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Show HN: I made a website recorder webapp you can use to create screencasts

42 points by bengoa ↗ HN
Just something I put together quickly:

https://webcast.browserprotect.me/

I made this in one day, now I'm wondering if It's interesting enough to make it a real product (Add new features like setting the size, zoom, annotations, fix bugs, export, voice-over, etc..)

Here is an example screencast I just did: https://webcast.browserprotect.me/view/2764aa94dcd855959819fd91881f0882baa61a0e-44646

Do you consider this a viable product? I'm thinking about offering it for free and then add some premium features.

24 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 61.9 ms ] thread
brianjking
Received an error when trying to POST -- is this not supported yet?
bengoa
It should be supported, but it's not thoughtfully tested yet, at this point it's just an experiment :)
shovel
Definitely a sweet idea and I can see some great use cases for onboarding new users to a site by demoing functionality. Really like how it just gets to work and outputs the vid without making me make any decisions. I'd love to see a gif output (maybe that could be one of your premium features :)

EDIT: Just cross-posted to PH. http://www.producthunt.com/posts/websitecast

BorisMelnik
if you do, just make sure to grandfather all of us in with beta accounts :)
MarcScott
I think this is a great idea. Could definitely see it being used in educational institutions where Chromebooks are popular.
atom-morgan
I've been wanting something like this to exist - specifically for weird browser compatibility issues or for submitting bugs. There's been a few times where I've encountered a bug, sent a message about it to someone on Twitter, and wished I could send a quick Snapchat/Vine of the issue to them. This would be much better than numerous screenshots. It shows exactly how I produced the bug.

This, hopefully, could allow me to do just that.

bazillion
Try Jing: http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/

It has a screencast feature that lets you create a video (which you can crop to whatever part of the screen) and then uploads that video onto their server and gives you a shareable link of the video.

At my last job, we used to use that for all of the bug reports, because it's a thousand times better than what you reference (taking multiple screenshots and having to explain exactly what's going on between them)

Here's an example of me using the program to get to this comment: http://screencast.com/t/zbfcEinhJN

It can be a little slow and wonky at times, but a lot of good (free!) features out of the box.

aembleton
I like it.

Looking at my logs, you are using Firefox in Windows 7. Is it just capturing screenshots of the browser, or did you write a plugin?

bengoa
It's Firefox inside a secure Linux container. We spoof the UA for privacy reasons, I made this browser mirroring technology for browserprotect.me, which didn't get any traction, so I'm trying to do something else with it!
animex
This is a great idea! Do it!
amitamb
I built something similar. Though you need to sign up to use it

http://www.castbin.com/

Great for an effort for a day though. Apparently I don't see mouse movements in playback.

rjuyal
Great website Amit. Sign-up is the only thing stopping all to use your website.
110king
went 10 layers deep, but it only shows the first 3.
waleedka
Nice idea! But it didn't work for me when I tried to login to my site. It opens a Facebook auth popup for the login.
mrborgen
Cool idea, I say go for it!
scribu
It seems like a neat idea, but I just get a blank rectangle where the site to record is supposed to show up. Nothing in the console; using latest Chrome on latest OS X.
kidlogic
I was looking for something like this today.

This would be great for on-boarding tutorials, troubleshooting, etc..

If you could add text bubbles (similar to Youtube) that would be superb :)