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Comment by geor9e | Hacker News Reader

Loom is software that, in one click, overlays your face in a bubble as you can narrate your screen recording, uploads it as it's recording, and when you press stop it copies a link to your clipboard you can share immediately with whoever you are showing. It's a very polished and complete experience.

OBS is for streamers. It could be set up in a similar way if you already have a twitch channel hooked into it. It won't be as polished and easy.

macOS doesn't have any upload or overlay function so it's not comparable.

ffmpeg is ffmpeg

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OBS works great when recording locally. Sure it works for streamers, but it also outputs to standard video formats easily. You don't need a twitch channel or anything like that. You'll need to figure out where to host the video after the fact (dropbox works well enough, as it allows the viewer to stream without downloading).

Yeah I fired up OBS for the first time and it was surprisingly easy to get set up. Every time I had a 'right how do I do x?' moment I figured it out in seconds.

I used loom for the first time today, not only did it do all the things you mentioned, but it perfectly transcribed what I said, then allowed me to cut out sections of the video just by deleting words and pauses from the transcription. I thought that was pretty cool.

OBS can record videos pretty similarly, and automatically save, stream, or even be compelled to upload it somewhere.

I'm not sure if there's a simple way to get the link of the video hosted online back into your clipboard automatically. That is one feature Jing was superior to Loom on.

Why does adding your face in a screen bubble add value to a screen recording tutorial?

Facial expressions can sometimes help humans communicate with each other

Are you asking in general why billions of online videos and conference calls are in this format? Or are you asking me personally? Personally I just like looking at my beautiful face.

macOS does have overlay functionality, it’s called presenter mode or something like that. Look for it in the green camera icon that shows up in the menu bar when you’re sharing your screen. It puts your face in a bubble overlayed on top of whatever you’re sharing, as you said. You’re right it doesn’t have upload though.

> You’re right it doesn’t have upload though.

That's surprising considering how Apple pushes iCloud integration...

Apple also pushes privacy and on-device processing;

But as for the feature itself: why on earth would you want a video uploaded somewhere else before you've even had a chance to watch it back at least once?

Because you’re showing a colleague how to use a simple inventory tracker that you’ve created in Google Sheets. Or how the new multilingual Figma templates work. Or how to batch rename a folder full of files using the command line. Or whatever, really. You already know what’s in the video because you literally just recorded it. And it doesn’t need to be polished because it’s probably just going to one coworker, who will only view it once.

You can also watch the video before sending the link…

It may not have upload, but in any worthwhile collaboration solution you can literally just drag your screen recording into the rich text area of a comment and have it show up, maybe after converting it to a neutral codec. I did this in my last job with Jira, GitHub, and Slack, ez

Of course you can do this. Loom does the conversion and compression for you automatically so you have an instantly sharable video. Saves me time. That’s the point.

Yep, that's obviously where the value would be, but the basics have been default for quite some time unless you're using a linux or windows workstation

the system video capture on macOS outputs a .mov not an mp4.

That works for FaceTime calls, but not for video recordings with QuickTime.

Oh interesting, I just looked into it and apparently it requires the app to support it. Apps like Keynote, Zoom, Slack, Facetime and Teams Classic (but not "new Teams") all support it. That's really strange imo, you'd think the OS would just add the overlay to the video signal and pass it through to the app. I wonder why it's implemented this way. The other OS-level video features like portrait mode, studio lighting, reactions and center stage don't require support from the app at all.

> ffmpeg is ffmpeg

What an excellent comment :D