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Show HN: Vento, a screen recorder that lets you rewind and record over mistakes (vento.so)

224 points by lefan ↗ HN
Hey folks, we made this screen recording tool to fix one simple problem - fixing your mistakes easily when recording so you don’t have to constantly restart or stitch. I’m not particularly great at presenting and so mistakes will inevitably happen during a screen recording, and it’s worse when you’re already 5 minutes into your recording, forcing you to restart completely. Please check this out and let us know what you think!

62 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread
[dead] MPlus88
[flagged]
dang
Please don't do this here.
retox
Looks very useful and intuitive. Does it cost anything? Either way I think it would helpful if you called it out somewhere.
ckle
Yea we’ll have to charge probably like $5-10mo eventually. For now, just want to know if the rewind feature is useful!
albert_e
Minor nit:

Misquoting Mahatma Gandhi for humor is perfectly fine. Misspelling his name as Ghandi, not so much.

lefan
Incredibly sorry about that, will fix!
quentinadam
Looks awesome! You should submit it to ProductHunt!
fernly
The site says nothing about itself. Is it only a Chrome extension? In what platforms can it record the screen (win? mac? linux? only in a browser?). What other features does it have, eg select a portion of the screen, visual indication of mouse clicks, etc.
layer8
I agree. At least when visiting on mobile, there’s too little basic information on what this even runs on, etc., making me leave the site without bothering further.
jonas-w
Funny thing is, when you turn your phone to landscape mode, the website instantly assumes you're on a desktop.
lefan
Using media queries to detect if it's mobile. I'll make an update to check for user agent instead :D
pmontra
Please don't :D Media queries are fine.
lefan
Thanks for the feedback. Currently the tool works the best on Chrome (with or without extension) on Mac and Window, with minor support for Safari.

We'll be sure to make a FAQ section on which platform we support and plans for features in the future. Thanks yall

zapzupnz
That shouldn't be an FAQ section, that should be front and centre.
albert_e
I use OBS as recording tool with YouTube Live Streaming as target.

Even though I don't intend to publish every screen recording I make.

I set videos to private so that I just save the recordings as is first.

Very few, after edits, get published to public. I can create much more public content in my field if there was an easy way (like OP) to correct mistakes and redact some content.

This saves a ton of local storage space for me. More importantly all important stuff is backed up to cloud and readily viewable by me on any device anywhere. I am loving this (will Google let me push this into TBs of free storage?)

I really wish there was either a capability that allows me to "pause" the recording on a live stream :) or otherwise easily edit, redact YouTube recordings after recording. The tools provided by YouTube (I am not a paying customer) are very rudimentary and barely useable performance-wise.

Good luck OP. Do you have any OBS plug-ins of similar kind in mind.

[dead] Local90
[flagged]
behnamoh
I mean, where do we draw the line? Is there a clause in YT's user agreement that limits how much private video storage one gets?
Local90
This why we can't have nice things /s
Local90
why are you booing me? I'm right
baxtr
Check out the HN guidelines please
alwayslikethis
One important thing Youtube provides is the encoding. It is rather difficult to re-encode large volumes of videos efficiently unless you have a recent, multi-core desktop CPU.
noodlesUK
This is definitely true, but if you have handbrake or similar, the hardware encode/decode in your CPU or GPU is actually pretty fast and good. This can be accessed via VAAPI, VDPAU, QSV and NVENC on linux (depending on your hardware), VideoToolbox on Mac, and also various options on Windows.
alwayslikethis
GPU encodes are far inferior to what YouTube provides. The bitrate is quite low and the quality acceptable for most purposes at higher resolutions. CPU is fast only if you are willing to have a fairly high bitrate, even with many cores.
DueDilligence
.. part of the google infrastructure?

not.

gonna.

happen.

CharlieDigital
What's the tech stack?

Looks really handy for those takes when the dog barks or the kids are yelling!

ckle
That's the idea :)
lefan
using NextJS, TsED and GCP!
anon1094
You can use Krisp.ai for that.
sanat
Looks great and congrats on the HN launch!

I can see myself using this to make my next screen recording.

ckle
Thanks! Please give it a shot and let us know what you think!
limitedsupply
This is a really handy tool, and the demo video goes straight to the point!

One minor criticism: it's a bit of a turn off when a well-known logo (and even its position in the header/footer) is so brazenly copied.

spencerchubb
Whose logo is being copied? It's just the name of the service in italics
limitedsupply
It looks very similar to Vimeo (just more italicized). The placement is identical too.
411111111111111
Different fonts, different spacings. I don't see how this is supposedly a ripoff.
TuringTest
That's just commodification of design; websites tend to exhibit very similar structures, styles, and design elements, so they're eventually bound to coincide at some point.

The logo is nothing more than the product name with a fancy italic font face; that's not even copyrightable. The similarity comes from having names with some matching letters.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
yasoob
I didn't feel as if it was a ripoff. It didn't even register with me that you were referring to Vimeo until I read the comments. Slightly similar font with a different name altogether shouldn't count as ripoff in my opinion :)
ckle
I know I'm just a random stranger on the internet - but I swear to God I didn't even use Vimeo as a reference for what it's worth! :)
boundlessdreamz
1. Where are the videos stored?

2. Can they be exported? Formats supported for export

3. What resolutions are supported?

lefan
Stored on the cloud (google cloud storage). We don't support export yet, but it might be a feature for pro users (MP4/H264)!

Currently videos are recorded at 1080p.

DavorDK
Looks pretty easy and straight forward to use. I myself use my phone for filming videos (over OBS), so I probably won't use it. I will recommend it to some of my fellow videomakers that could benefit from it, though.
psychphysic
I'm concerned about the business model.

So it's free, but presumably I will have to pay to export my video?

yasoob
I was curious about the same thing. But turns out you can download (export) the video without paying anything for now. Maybe it will become paid in the future?
ckle
Free for now! But we're hoping to build a small side business out of this, so we'll probably charge for say, over 10m videos, higher fidelity videos, hosting lots of videos, etc.

Anything in that list feel unfair? Anything you'd add?

psychphysic
It's not at all unfair.

But I'd never use the service. Still is suspect HN isn't your target audience anyways.

ckle
You're probably right. Can I ask why you'd never use it? What if you could download & delete the cloud recording with one button?
jack_riminton
Very nice idea and execution. Keeping it simple is the best way to go. Would love to see you turn it into a cheaper Loom competitor! (viewer counts for example)
dezzeus
I'd like to highlight the wordplay around re-wind: Vento means wind (as moving air) in Italian, and ventoso (vento.so) translates to windy. :)
jaclaz
As an Italian I am failing to see the cleverness, even if they are written the same wind and wind (different pronounciation) have different roots and meanings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph

It would be like you had a site about planting seeds and had the site named por.ca.

Now, if it was something like riavvol.to, it would have made more sense.

luxoramonrising
Just enable windows game bar for your ide and browser. It allows you to export past 30 seconds of your screen capture.
chmod775
I know this pain. What this tool purports to do can be accomplished with a video editing software, BUT that's super annoying and a time sink.

Kudos for trying to make this more ergonomic.

johny115
Looks good, but since there is no transparency on pricing, it doesn't motivate me to sign up. Not sure if there is pricing visible after signing up, but I can't be bothered to find out. Id be clear what is offered for free and where does/will paid plan start, if there is even anything for free at all, or it's jut premium pricing.
ckle
free right now! but we do plan to add a paid tier at some point. But the hope is to always have some amount of the service free
mrlinx
Is there an alternative but that does it all locally? I'd love to avoid the cloud part. And I'd like it to be as easy as this, unlike OBS/Camtasia.
danuker
I use SimpleScreenRecorder. You can choose "Separate file per segment", and each time you pause you get a new file.

I then delete the mistaken takes, and concatenate everything with an FFMPEG script.

brk
On Mac: Quicktime + iMovie.

Quicktime has a very simple/flexible screen recorder built in. You can record a section of your screen, or full screen. If you make a mistake, pause for 5 seconds and then just do a re-take on the fly.

Import the QT recording into iMovie. Clip out of the unwanted sections and export your video.

ckle
We'll let you download the video after, and delete it too! Maybe all in one-button. I'm assuming you don't want cloud because of your data? Even better for us, we don't have to pay for hosting..
taubek
This looks like a interesting tool. I usually use desktop app for cutting out the parts where I made a mistake.
hasseo
Does it record a chrome tab in the background?