Software >

(on Wikipedia)
https://manycam.com/

• https://manycam.com/blog/

2015-08-05 – 4.1 ∞

• TODO – https://manycam.com/affiliate

• TODO – https://manycam.com/help

• costs – has a free version.

  • $50 for the pro version. I don’t know how significant the additions are, compared to the free version.
  • $150 for h264 streams. This is high quality.
  • I presume the costs are in USD.

Features ∞

https://manycam.com/download/

Particularly interesting items are noted with a +

• + “Lower Thirds” – watermarking.
• + Use your webcam with multiple applications simultaneously
• Draw over your video window
• + Screencast your desktop
• + Ability to capture and display specific applications.
• Record and capture your game play with the Game video source.
• + Picture in Picture
• + Quickly switch between video & audio sources

• + Record video and audio to your hard drive.

Other interesting features:

• Use your mobile phone as a video source with the ManyCam Mobile Source for Android.

ManyCam Studio Pro ∞

ManyCam Pro allows you to record videos to show later, broadcast live video with multiple sources, switch between audio sources, cross-fade and transition, add text over your live video or screencast and unlock awesome ManyCam Pro audio and video effects.

First impressions ∞

• The website is nice and clean.

  • Unfortunately it lists LifeHacker review quote at the bottom, which is Gawker Media and therefore plagued. This literally made me question the quality of ManyCam.
• The download is a web installer. I see no way to download the proper program. The download page says it’s 47.2 MB but the actual download is 290kB.
• The installer is fancy. Sigh.
• The installer has an entry to launch ManyCam on startup. Why in the fuck would I want to do that?

• WARNING – The installer has “MyStart Experience”.

  • Even though ManyCam is transparent about installing this bullshit extra, this is a black mark.
  • The bottom-left “Decline” button is what should be clicked.

• The installation progress style is fancy, but I don’t care too much. I do, however, have a peeve when I see this installer at 100% and I cannot click “Next”. I waited and was given a “finished” window. Then I could click “Finish”. I don’t understand why I would even need to do this, just finish the fucking install and launch the program already..

• The interface seems intuitive to me.
• Adding text, I see I can add two lines of text and it looks good. However, for some reason I can additional lines of text, and none of that will appear. I see no feature to increase the height of the text area.

• When adding text, I can disable the ManyCam logo. That’s unexpected and pleasant.

• All of ManyCam’s sliders are too damned small to grip and move around. Very bad design.

• Showing the time is easy enough, but I don’t see a way to move it out of the middle of the screen.

  • Oh! I later learned that I can just drag it around the preview area.

• Lower third is a cool idea. It’s just a bit of graphics using the two-line text title and subtitle concept.

  • I have no idea what this is or how to significantly customize it. See Creating a custom .mclt (Lower Third).
• All the tabbed-features at the bottom of the window are trivial to figure out.
• Picture in picture is easy.
• Screencasting and the like is easy.
• Adding multiple sources is also trivial.

• Adding effects is trivial.

Overall impression – RECOMMENDED ∞

• I don’t want a web-installer. What if I wanted to do video recording on a machine that’s offline?
• The installer having bullshit packaged in is a real serious problem to me.
• Startup is crazy-fast.

• Every feature was amazingly easy to figure out.

Would I pay money for it? – Maybe. I see no useful features for the pro version.

• The program itself gives hints as to which features are available with the pro version.

• The website only lists two interesting features:

  • HD resolutions. This is the biggest selling point.
  • Desktop capture window selector.

• “Mobile Source” is actually quite interesting. Being able to easily stream from an Android device would be very useful. I can hypothesize this being done without ManyCam on that device, but I’d bet ManyCam makes it easy.

• The features page mentions recording videos to show later, but I don’t see how that’s a selling point. The free version already allows this.

I recommend this software.

Customization ∞

• Creating a custom .mclt (Lower Third)