Vidblaster Vs Wirecast

[AndrewSeabrook]

Brian, so where have I said that any of this is a negative? If you don't like the product, don't buy or use it. It is as simple as that.

My intention with my comments is to lower the personal nature of the debate and stick to more objective and observable fact. As I said above all of the tools are fine. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I use all of them for different purposes and love that fact that they will all inter-operate. I have had excellent support on each forum and have had excellent support from each company./ Let us get the tenor of the discussion away from the abusive and destructive personal rants about individuals and instead concentrate on improving our production values in the product we are all producing. The switcher software we use, whilst important, is in reality only one small part of that puzzle.

CseeMan. Your explanation on the background of Wirecast was interesting. I hadn't realized that WC had been around as long as it has. It also supported my comment that Telestream provides a much larger team for the development of the product, and for those who will quickly chime in that there are only two developers, don't underestimate the graphic designers, testers, support people etc that the broader Telestream supplies. That is why they are more able to work with external companies to develop interfaces and functionallity than a single person team.

Quick restatement about streaming...VB and vMIx use FMLE as the default encoder. You can stream to multiple CDN's using FMLE and you can stream at multiple bitrates. FMLE can achieve the same result as the WC encoder, but it does it differently. Both VB and vMix can use other encoders...WC for example or FFMEG....or hardware encoders. Please let us stop confusing the encoding question with the switcher.

Backup systems. In WC/VB/vMix you are able to have a second copy of the software installed on a backup machine. In all cases, only one copy may be operated at any one time.

Streaming settings. Yes VB has restrictions on the upload stream if you are using the inbuilt interface to FMLE, but you can input directly to FMLE and bypass this restriction on all versions of VB.

Recording and streaming at different resolutions. You can do this with all three products. As I said before there are different ways of achieving this result.

Yes, VB and vMIx are resticted to windowsOS's, but you can run them on Macs using a Windows install on that hardware. I have also been able to run them, and WC, in virtual machines on WindowsOS.

Recording Codecs. What most miss in the discussion about codecs is that they, in the main, have to be licenced, and therefore add to the cost of the product. Also as the codecs are updated, so there is an increased resource load on the development teams to test and modify their code to support the new codecs. Each of the companies makes a commercial decision about the codecs that they will bundle and support into their product.

Your point about CPU use is valid. WC and vMix take a lot of advantage of the GPU, whilst VB primarily targets the CPU. The VB chromakey module uses both CPU and GPU resources.