You're also robbing yourself of increasing the prices to keep the lights on. Business-wise this is not a very good idea. Also as a customer I have the feeling that this is a stupid idea. If the costs increase, you have to increase prices. If I like something and want to keep using it, that's the only way.
Similar thought, but also thought this is setup for a lawsuit - I mean, I get lifetime unlimited video storage for $9 a month? I can already think of several ways to abuse that and then complain.
“For the lifetime of your subscription“ still lets them cancel the subscription unilaterally without breaking the promise. So if they want to hike the price of existing subscriptions, they can still legally say “agree to the price increase or your subscription will end on X date, after which you can choose to re-subscribe at the new price if you like.” It just prevents them from automatically and unilaterally increasing these subscriptions’ prices.
It also might not prevent them from amending the fair use terms of the subscription to require paying overage charges for unfair or abusive usage patterns, without unilaterally changing the monthly price.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Where can I pay to build Loom functionality and polish into OBS, making this open source and available in perpetuity? I mean no offense to products of these sorts, but the constant reinventing of the wheel, product churn, etc is somewhat disheartening when people just want the ability to screencast in a frictionless manner.
With any of those you need to upload the video directly into Slack, or something like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Plausible for short videos, but can become a pain if recording for more than a few mins.
If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go).
You can also receive comments on your Cap link, reactions, and see the analytics data.
It just makes it easier. Do your recording, then receive your shareable Cap link in just a few seconds.
> If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go).
Playing an mp4 from a static file server buffers only the parts it consumes, including support for seeking. HTTP range requests work just fine.
That makes sense. How about if I already run a PeerTube instance. In that case I already have segmentation of videos so people can watch without downloading the whole file, and they could also comment on the video on my PeerTube instance if I allowed them to.
How does Cap compare to using a PeerTube instance to host screen recordings?
Yeah, but not quite. I’m not dismissing their product. Just wondering if it would be worth running a Cap server when I already have tools to make screen recordings, and I already have a PeerTube instance where I can host videos.
And actually now I am also wondering if Cap could be integrated with PeerTube so you could have which ever things Cap brings to the table aside from video hosting and have it either upload to PeerTube by API, or even having some version of Cap existing as a sort of plugin into PeerTube so that you could use it from within PeerTube
It is better than peertube because it doesn't require an extra piece of software to be learned and setup and maintained to host and deliver recorded videos.
One of the benefits of Loom is the convenience of video messaging. So it’s less about screen recording in the same way as OBS but more about replacing Slack with something more efficient. I’m not sure Cap is a replacement for Loom in that sense.
I thought so too until I used the "video messaging" of loom and found it to be a reorganized use of existing loom features instead of first class video messaging.
Video messaging can also waste both parties times if the videos are too long compared to the message.
Video messaging can be infinitely priceless where a video can explain quicker what words can't.
Other platforms have been able to get a bit further, I think there is one made by vimeo or someone used for sales that is quite good at the video messaging itself.
I love it. I forget why I quit using Loom but you're my new default now.
One feature request: When I press "Start Recording" via the browser, I don't want it to immediately start recording that screen. Give me a 3…2…1…Go with a sound so I can minimize my browser and show what I want to record. I don't all my videos to start with me fumbling for the Start button.
Wonder whats the status of AI which knows which durations can be edited out since you were fumbling with mouse movements and voice. Bonus points if it detects "takes" of the same scene. Around 2005, Linux users were recording TV on their PCs and detecting/skipping ads automatically and soon after, podcast apps were skipping lulls in the voice.
The home page does somewhat assume that the reader knows what "Loom" is -- if I'm not already a Loom user, that's pretty much instructing me to go look at Loom first because it's obviously the market leader in whatever-it-does.
From context, I'm guessing it's not about textile manufacture?
And I think various open source engines, reimplementations or examinations of the original have been posted a to HN a few times over the years to a lot of positive comments as people remembered the original. I assumed this was another along the same lines.
Congrats on the product - looks great! I'd love to hear more about your experience using Tauri for this? What are the pros/cons and do you feel like it was the right choice so far?
I'm curious about your plans around open-source, since you're using it as a selling point. There's been a lot of discussion about projects that start as open-source but then go to a more restrictive license once other companies start offering their own hosted versions. Is that a concern for you?
Do you plan to include any/all of the "pro" features on the roadmap in the open-source code?
Note that they appear to have started with AGPL, which goes a long way towards preventing the kinds of uses that prominent license switches were designed to prevent.
Also it looks like they don't (yet) have a copyright assignment, which would make it exceedingly difficult to relicense if they got significant external contributions.
How do you quantify “lightweight”? This is used in a couple places, but without additional information it’s essentially meaningless.
I’m starting to think that this is a red flag when looking at a project when there’s no further information. It’s marketing-speak masquerading as a technical attribute, but without additional information could just be 100% incorrect. It’s also overly-generic… depending on the intent of the author, lightweight could mean CPU-efficient, small binary, feature-light, and so on, but when not qualified further it seems to be implicitly all of these and more, but most likely that’s not accurate.
My marketing pet-peeve aside, this looks nice and I will be trying it out. :) Congrats on your HN launch!
Note that hackernews is notoriously anti “marketing speech”. I don’t think there’s anything bad with elaborating but lightweight/snappy/slim is pretty much what’s important, given that there’s so much slow bloatware out there. Not all users are technical, and eg throwing out benchmarks on the front page would be complete mumbo jumbo to many users.
That said, I also think the best way to communicate the intended vibe is also through screenshots (which you already have) and design. Looks awesome.
Lightweight is a great adjective when comparing with existing "heavyweight" software - most people would understand what it means if you say "Numbers is a lightweight Excel-like spreadsheet"; "Zoom is a lightweight Go-to-meeting".
In that case I'd go straight to "responsive" or "fast" or something. The vast bulk of users literally don't understand what we mean by lightweight; ask around as to which is larger, a kilobyte or a gigabyte, with your non-technical friends and I bet you find even the ones who get it right do a lot more fumbling than you expect.
Yes, I like responsive too, although it’s borderline industry jargon. I still think snappy is perhaps a bit more down to earth but I don’t know how common it is outside of American English, which could be a problem with an international audience.. words are hard.
I think the important thing to get across isn’t binary size or even RAM usage per se, but rather that it’s the opposite of bloated. Regular non-techies are tortured every day with really slow and unnecessarily networked applications. There was a thread like a month ago about the 400+ MB LinkedIn iPhone app.
Feedback: can there be a big “loom” on the homepage showing how it works or what differentiates it? Right now we only see tweets but nothing that gives me the “aha” moment to want to try it out.
Make me remember the pain, and show me really clearly how your software will fix it right now. Screen studio does a good job of this.
An animated gif video with a ticker on the side going through each step would be great.
Also being able to launch recording it without an account would be a great way to get someone to create a video, invest enough to create an account instead of come back to it later. Veed.io seems to have used this approach to great success.
That is a really dark pattern which I personally hate.
Sucker me in and then raise the barrier. It is on the same level as those "create free account" but nothing is actually free except for the account creation process.
We have word for this: Demos. It could be a "free demo" account or an "account free" demo. Two different but easily understandable things which clearly communicates intent and value. Nothing Sneaky and no hiding weasels.
It just triggered me that this marketing funneling newspeak actually has become commonplace and generally accepted.
Change the wording to "launch demo (recording)" and communicate it clearly will make this grumpy fart happy. And yes: There is a subtle difference and therein lies the darkness.
The video and ticker are however great ideas as-is without me complaining.
Since I hate dark patterns, I likely did not do a good job of explaining.
I am saying to show someone a quick summary of what a demo would have (in seconds to earn more seconds to invite them to demo.
From an onboarding perspective, the goal is to remove friction for the user.
First at a feature, cognitive, and then emotional level. How to do this can be used for good an bad.
Demos are great. What I'm talking about is the thing that compels them to try it out, rather than "I don't really get what this does, an I'm not sure if I want to invest my time in yet another thing to be dissapointed", for example.
Demos take more time than a quick animation that shows step 1,2,3.
Conveying the ease of how it can work for them, to help them understand how the features can help hem, as well as address any existing is a simple call to action to get the features in front of them in the precious first few secons an ensure that communication is being improved
I use both discord and irc, I vastly prefer irc for project discussion, but haven't exactly been able to pinpoint why. I think perhaps, for me, it's that topics tend to stay much more focused, but I understand this probably has to do with discord having servers>channels>threads and boards, where projects use some, but not all of them in the same way.
I often wonder if a mattermost community should be backstop an integrate into a slack and discord community to let people use what they want, but you have your own history owned.
Discord seems nice but it also has to fit the audience. I find it convoluted for business or support type chats, but it is excellent for community building around digital experiences (like gaming)
I wish an open standard won, but the reality is that in 2024 even in open source, it’s going to be easier to grow a Discord community than a Matrix one because more people habitually use Discord.
Matrix lost, or never even won, outside some unusually neckbeard-y communities. I gotta admit I kinda enjoyed watching someone try to make normies use it. Impossible. To be fair, discord is hard. But Matrix was really impossible.
Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.
Meanwhile, Element as an app is also evolving rapidly too. Totally agreed that the onboarding has been awful in the past, but we're plugging away improving it and trying to make it more glossy and less neckbeardy, as per https://element.io/labs/element-x etc.
The fact is that Discord has raised $1B+ to run a centralised unencrypted comms platform; meanwhile Element is doing something ~10x harder (decentralised & E2EE) with a tiny fraction of the $. It takes longer, but the difference is that Matrix should last indefinitely, whereas Discord will get Eloned sooner or later.
I wouldn't say we've lost yet, but ymmv. I do wish we'd progressed faster though.
> Matrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly.
If your argument is at all trying to be even in the ballpark of “Matrix is accessible to normal folks” then you’ve immediately failed with this sentence alone.
And at the end of the day, that is what the comment you were replying to was saying, that Matrix will never win outside of niche spaces. And as long as it’s not as simple as a single app with a single brand for people to remember, it’s not going to succeed.
The web was not competing with literally hundreds of other services with tighter branding and the weight of multi-billion dollar megacorporations pushing for their success. They have far more resources available to push their own services and have absolutely no incentive to integrate with any other service or protocol.
I wish you luck, but optimism and blind faith isn’t going to magically make WhatsApp et al go away.
Reasons I use Loom:
- Social features, users can comment & engage with my video to provide feedback
- Analytics, I get notifications when a user views a video (useful for demos/sales)
- Post-capture editing
- Set 1.X speed by default on videos (significantly reduces video length)
I don't find the capturing element of loom very good. Their chrome integration is pretty bad, seems to not handle clicking/changing pages when capturing a tab.
I recently started using Screen Studio and have really liked it.
Is the ‘free’ part of open source not a priority? There is an AGPL license, but it looks like future contributors will be required to use proprietary services for this helping this project with Discord & Microsoft GitHub as the only communication options. If FOSS is good enough for your project, it should be good enough for the tools used to build your community…
That seems overy ideological. While the software itself might be good enough (it often isn't, as that's why these products are being developed), hosting it is a work that can be better spent on the project itself.
For small projects, there are community & non-profit options that don’t require self-hosting. Alternatively, if your tooling is actually decentralized, then you don’t need to become a massive host & a bedroom PC can ‘host’ a project.
I don't like the name "Cap". It implies a limit of some kind. Why would I sign up to get caped? I want unlimited video, not capped. I know you were going for capture, but now you're just cap.
Congrats on the launch! It looks quite slick and something I could see myself using. I'm curious, what do the costs of operation and margins look like for a service like this?
I was really excited for this. But I am largely disappointed. The flaws with Loom being closed source is that it's free tier is so horrible. Cap's free tier is just as bad. There is no reason why I would pay cap and not loom. The open source aspect is nice, but I also don't care about loom not being open source because whatever I post on loom is public anyway.
It would be really nice if cap was client side and allowed you to save the video directly to your drive. That way you could remove the paid tier and make it free for everyone. Adding 1 or 2 more options for webcam shape etc could also be a good selling point.
Some feedback on your site's UX - on desktop, I don't expect hovering on a menu item to open a new context, so by habit I click on it. You're opening on hover, though, and my click is closing the context immediately.
The landing page only really highlights the video recording aspect, it would be interesting to see imo how it replaces loom in what comes after the recording (even if it's still WIP).
> Cap is currently in public beta, and is available for macOS and Web. Windows and Linux builds are in development. Join the Cap Discord (https://discord.gg/y8gdQ3WRN3) to help test future releases and join the community.
The closed source platform Discord may not be the best place for an open source community, but this is probably a whole different discussion. https://matrix.org/
It’s poor taste to hijack another “show hn” post. Probably not against the rules but definitely frowned upon. Similar to proposing to significant other at a friends engagement party.
Maybe. I agree it could have been worded different including giving some constructive feedback on it..
Ppl who discover a category of software might hesitate to try it out while looking for alternatives to compare it against.
It also helps the author be aware of other features that might be of interest to them.
Cap.so would still remain my first option to try out. It's unique compared to another good screen capture, screenity.io, which is more locally run in the browser.
The thread is about an author who created an alternative to loom.
People discussing other alternatives to Loom, or alternatives to what the author created is besides the point, to the extend that there might be helpful comparisons and questions. Could be just me tho, which is totally fair.
The "I'll pass" at the end was pretty negative but I agree with the rest of their sentiment.
Advertising is just as much about showing people they have a problem as it is about telling them you have a solution. But by positioning the product as an "open-source Loom" you've immediately lost the first half of the benefit of advertising. Everyone knows what a Coke is so I can get away with calling my new beverage "a healthier cola". Loom isn't so well-known.
It's also dangerous if you can only explain your product as a variation of an existing product; it means you're not able to sell your product "directly".
Love it. I hate loom. Dark patterns abound. Its time we have a better orientated replay alternative (but I’m still waiting for a widely adopted true session replay alternative)
The key innovation of Loom, and of course I'm using that term loosely, was the inclusion of a human face in a circle at the bottom left of your video. We're monkeys, and monkeys like to see another monkey's face while they're hearing someone talk. It helps with communication all around, nuance, recall etc
This is the same "killer feature" of Twitch (or more generally video game streaming).
So that's all to say, I really recommend you include that in your landing page somehow. Screen sharing is frankly meh, a slide deck is fine, you can use Quicktime or similar to share. But the key is automatically overlaying a circle of your webcam on top of whatever you're recording to share.
I suppose the other feature of importance is a simple URL to share it. I don't see if that's possible via Cap. How do I share these videos to my colleagues?
Loom still came up short against a predecessor, Jing, which would also copy the url into your clipboard. You hit stop recording, open an email, paste, and write your message and send. No need to wait while it was uploading, etc.
Some honest feedback: describe your product/tool without using a competitor’s name. I’m on mobile and the landing page only tells me “recording software” and “Loom” before it drops into Twitter like 3rd party comments.
I honestly have never used Loom. I don’t know what it is. Do you really want me to have to go look up “the competition” just to know who you are?
I disagree - the fact you don’t know what Loom is probably means you’re not in the market for this kind of software. Better, at this stage, to focus on users who will immediately get it rather than explain to folks who don’t currently have a need.
I think that might be true for a small group of people.
Calling it a replacement screen recording tool like Loom is probably ideal to hit both markets.
Loom made the work around the recording step easier, something that other options seem to be adopting.
Still, lots of people recorded lots of screens before Loom, kind of like loom.
Camtasia, Jing, and plenty of other tools out there. Jing in particular would record and upload automatically and put the link to the video in your clipboard, years in advance of Loom registering potentially questionable patents to parts of that.
Loom was ultimately acquired by Atlassian as a video capture tool for JIRA, etc an won't likely grow much feature wise for the masses. It will be great for that. I'm still a paying customer of loom.
There are a lot of features missing in Loom though that is going to spark a lot of alternatives to continue from where Loom left off. If anything Loom's growth seemed to have stalled relative to how much they were acquired for.
Average people are using apps like tiktok to produce videos instead.
Calling it a screen recording tool is a good thing. A lot of people don't even know how easy it is to do a screen recording on a computer.
When I heard of Loom, my first thought went to that classic Lucas Arts adventure game. The name is shared by so many different things, it isn't descriptive of anything.
It's easier for us at the start to get some attention from Loom specific users by mentioning Loom directly, but it's not a sustainable strategy going forward.
Will update the marketing copy etc over the coming weeks/months to be more about the problem we're solving specifically.
Yeah. I get that. And I’m sure there’s some SEO-style positive feedback you get for it. But also being able to pitch it to me in a simple way and then using Loom as an example I think would be more helpful.
“Screen recording software that emphasizes simple sharing. An open source alternative to Loom”. Still super simple but is more useful to people less exposed to your world.
I think it's really useful to describe your product as an alternative to a well known product. Most people will instantly get it, much more so than a long re-definition of the original product.
Same. I’ve never heard of Loom and (therefore?) I’m honestly not sure how this would be different on a Mac than a QuickTime screen recording. And since the promo images are from a Mac, my first thought is Quicktime is probably safer.
Just to address this comment chain: loom does make it easier to do screen recordings and demos, and additionally has features like timestamped comments and notes and sharing functionality.
The target customer is a business who is making demo videos and needs these kinds of tracking/collaboration/commenting features.
Folks interested in open source maybe want a better offering, don’t want to be locked in, want more favorable pricing, or want a self hosted version.
As someone who has used loom, the value proposition is clear from the title without even going to the website.
What's missing (maybe for brevity) is why it's important to have a co-founder. I find it hard to believe that they just wanted that box ticked and more that there's something else a co-founder brings to the table... so what is it? What is _actually_ missing in the formula for them?
Also [0].
> "probably not good enough / won't get in" - you'd be surprised at how many people feel that way, whether because of impostor syndrome, lack of credentials, whatever—and often they turn out to be among the best founders. So this a terrible reason not to apply!
Maybe it's not a terrible reason not to apply. /shrug
Side question: can anyone tell me the point of Loom? My team uses it to record a screencast and then paste the link on Slack or GitHub. I do the same but I don’t need extra software because my OS already has the functionality and both services accept uploads.
The auto-transcription into text is the big thing.
I personally find that most of the time when a coworker posts a video I don’t even need to watch it to get all the information I actually needed.
One could argue that what you’re doing is inconveniencing your coworkers and ensuring anybody using a screen-reader can’t actually consume your videos.
- You refer to it as "screen sharing", but that makes me think of live sharing like Zoom etc. Wouldn't "screen recording" be a better description?
- The "get started for free" text in the header CTA flows onto a second line for me
- It would be good to have an embedded demo video on the landing page