Hey HN, we're excited to introduce Sorbay - an open source alternative to Loom for creating and sharing screen recordings.<p>With Sorbay, you can easily record your screen, camera, and microphone all at once. It is a complete solution that comes with its own backend service, allowing you to instantly share a link of your recording as soon as it is finished. The video is streamed directly to the backend service as the recording happens to make this possible.<p>With both founders based in different countries, we needed a tool to quickly share screen recordings to keep us up to date or to ask for feedback. Meetings are cool if you need to discuss something deeply, but for almost everything else a quick recording works better.<p>We had to settle for one of the proprietary solutions because none of the open source tools allowed us to quickly share something with each other. Doing the recording is one aspect, but having the ability to instantly share a link was crucial. Waiting on a 400mb video upload to a Dropbox is just too much interruption if you want to quickly share something.<p>The tipping point for us to actually build this open source tool came via an interaction from one of our day jobs. A third party provider sent a screen recording full of confidential information and to make things worse, all of it was uploaded by them to a different third party service. We strongly believe that information like this should stay within a company, ideally on infrastructure that they control themselves. Having a fully integrated open source solution is the best way to go for this.<p>Our goal with this first public release is to gather feedback. The critical code paths are working, but it is still a bit rough to use. We deliberately
cut out all non-essential features, but have a clear roadmap on what we want to release this year.<p>There are a couple of known issues like audio glitches, non-working videos in Safari and crashing binaries that we hope to fix in the coming weeks. Later this
year, we plan on releasing a cloud hosted version of Sorbay that would let you connect your own S3 storage provider. Additionally, we will be releasing an on-prem option focused on features for enterprises (SSO, RBAC, compliance).<p>Both the Sorbay Client and the backend service are completely open source. For licensing we choose the AGPLv3 throughout the stack. The client is built
with Vue.js on top of Electron. The use of Electron might be a bit controversial here on Hackernews but given the resources we currently have that was
the only way that allowed us to get a working client out on all major platforms. The backend service is realized with Django. We use Keycloak for
authentication and Minio for S3 compatible storage. All of this is run alongside Postgres and Redis, running on Docker containers which are managed by Docker Compose.<p>We invite you to try Sorbay for yourself and join us on our issue tracker[1][2], Slack channel[3] or here on HN.<p>Thanks for checking out Sorbay!<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay">https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay-client">https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay-client</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://join.slack.com/t/slack-oso6527/shared_invite/zt-1qd8gm543-KGdb5gD4WqikZEKEk8sSTA" rel="nofollow">https://join.slack.com/t/slack-oso6527/shared_invite/zt-1qd8...</a>
Love it. Screen recorders have always been strangely pricey especially before OBS came out.<p>I used to be a Loom user but actually churned because the screen recording in Slack is so good. You can download it without posting so I use it if I need to email a video.<p>Of course, it lacks the killer feature of link sharing.<p>Congratulations on launching and best of luck!
I churned with Loom too because I don't need the storage part and was looking for an alternative. I like the idea of an open-source Loom alternative. However, if anyone is looking, I found out that an old software I was using, Cleanshot[1], added the feature to record your webcam and screen with their recent update. I have started using it again. For the upload part (I don't use their cloud), either using Dropbox or Google drive is pretty trivial to setup and is done by the time I finish writing the email or a cup of tea to send to anyone that needs it.<p>For the Sorbay founders here -- best of luck and congratulations on the launch. Personally, I felt your narrative is kinda made-up and not genuine or compelling enough (again, may be just me and trying to be open, trying to do the founder-to-founder open feedback). Can we try a different narrative? The reasoning is, why would the team just give up what they were doing and start working on a tool because one of their tool get in the way of getting their work done efficiently?<p>Finally, a tool such as a screen-recorder is good to have an open-source alternative but that's that -- it is open source for the sake of being open source and falls into the current hot open-source core but paid service layer business model.<p>Again, best of luck and I will definitely try it out once it is public, the pricing is decided and ready to use (not the waitlist thingy).<p>1. <a href="https://cleanshot.com" rel="nofollow">https://cleanshot.com</a>
Congrats on launching. Can you add an auto-zooming feature like <a href="https://screen.studio" rel="nofollow">https://screen.studio</a><p>Many screen recordings are now consumed on mobile, and it's difficult to see details without zooming.<p>I tried doing this on Windows with OBS, and got it working with a Python script but it was painful.
Congratz on new useful tool into the market!<p>I happened tried another 2 products shared here by combinators, both are cool, have link sharing feature, I remembered one got video file size limitations, but for light usage, its really neat.<p>I won't mention the products because I seldom use I even forgot the name, but all stay in my bookmarks when I need I open the website.
I once tried to make something like loom but then I saw their patents and got scared<p><a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US9641566B1/en" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US9641566B1/en</a>
Loom has been working on an SDK which has been in BETA forever. Hopefully this could be a good alternative if it can be easily integrated into other products.