For about two years now I’ve been a huge advocate of Shinywhitebox applications. Their iShowU Classic app is still the best introductory level screen recorder you can buy for Mac OS X, and Stomp is pretty much the best video compression software you can buy for under a grand. But after these two great applications, Shinywhitebox fell upon hard times with the utter failure of Chatter (and alternative for Leopard’s built in screen-sharing ability over iChat) and iShowU HD (the latest iteration of iShowU).
Now just so you know where I’m coming from, I used to work for Shinywhitebox as tech support and I even made the really cheesy/bad promotional video for iShowU HD. I was the first person besides Neil to ever use iShowU HD in its extreme alpha form and I have been testing it for issues ever since. I knew that its initial release still had a lot of bugs in it but it was a first release, can’t expect much from that. The problem is that now it has been six months and iShowU HD is still extremely buggy. It still feels like a beta application to me.
Almost every time I try to record with it one thing or another goes wrong. Too boot it takes a good 5-10 seconds to launch iShowU HD. iShowU Classic, however, launches in about a second flat. Upon finishing my recording I opt to have iShowU compress after the video has been recorded in order to save CPU cycles when recording. Fifty percent of the time it will crash when doing this if I record anything over five minutes in length.
Neil added in a feature just in case this happened called “recovery mode.” This mode is designed to recover files that were compressing when iShowU HD crashed. It works to some degree, but I’ve never gotten it to work fully. Some of the video will be missing, or the audio will remain but no video, etc. Not only that but compressing after the fact takes forever and makes my machine unusable.
Another issue I’ve been having is that my audio is getting out of sync in a lot of videos I record. Again, Neil has tried to fix this, but it still happens to me all the time.
Neil, I’m sorry. I still support your company, but I cannot support iShowU HD. You know that from day one it’s been one problem after another for me. I just can’t use this when I’m trying to record now. I need performance and reliability and iShowU HD lacks both. iShowU Classic is reliable, but not good on performance.
Therefore my only other option right now is to go back to my previous high performance screen recorder: Snapz Pro X. I have not found a single bug in Snapz Pro X in the entire time I’ve used it. It compresses videos after the fact and is literally four times faster than iShowU HD in doing so (with the same settings), plus my machine is still extremely usable.
So goodbye iShowU HD. I’ll give you another shot in six more months.
I still use iShowU from time to time, but have always stayed away form iShowU HD, not due to how it performs but because I use Screenflow. I feel ya on what your saying thou.
BullBoyKennels
April 16th, 2009
Screenflow doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t integrate well with Final Cut.
William Bokunic
April 16th, 2009