We have a new feature for creators who want to save time when recording videos. Any questions or feedback for our founders? Come hang out LIVE with Geige & Dan — they'll answer your questions about StreamYard: a browser-based tool that lets you live stream, record videos & podcasts, and host webinars.

Welcome to episode 241 of the StreamYard Live Town Hall.

We have some exciting updates to share that have been asked for for a really long time, so excited to go through those.

For anyone new here, Dan and I are the founders of StreamYard.

We do these town halls every single Sunday at 6 p.m.

Pacific, and we do them for a few reasons.

1 is to stay in tune with all of you, go through the same flow that you all do with your own shows and productions.

That's why we're calling it Ask StreamYard.

So if there's anything you'd like us to touch on tonight, feel free to leave it in the chat.

And we'll do our best to get to as many as we possibly can.

And third, I always mention the 3 pillars of StreamYard, which are ease of use, stability, and professional stream.

So if you're about those 3 things, streaming is the tool for you.

See people tuning in from all over the world tonight.

Before I forget, we have lots of Awesome shows on StreamYard.

We have YouTube channel reviews with Dee and Daniel, the second Saturday of every month.

Really fun and useful show if you're looking to grow on YouTube.

They're both experts when it comes to everything YouTube and they do specific reviews on individual channels so you can get really good insights to understand things like how to think about a particular niche, how to think about how often to post thumbnails, everything that is necessary for succeeding on YouTube.

And then we have Enhance Your Livestreams, the last Tuesday of the month with Nick Nimmin, who again, pro when it comes to all things video, but tune into that 1 for your specific live streaming questions.

And then 1 thing we've been doing at the start of these so that we get to know a little bit more about you and you get to know a little bit more about us is a fun fact and the fun fact we had for tonight was favorite sitcom if you have 1 if you have a favorite sitcom

So I guess you and I probably have the same favorite sitcom.

Yeah, we've chatted about it before, but Seinfeld definitely is my favorite.

I think it was 1 of the, maybe it wasn't the first sitcom, but it was 1 of the, definitely like sort of helped define what a sitcom is, but yeah, I always loved Seinfeld.

Yeah, I assume it's a favorite of a lot of people out there.

Cool, let's get into a couple questions first, and then we'll get into the update.

We had 1 at the beginning from WSLM Radio says, would like to have on the fly lower thirds, especially for news or sports segments.

So I'm guessing you already know this WSLM, but in case you don't.

So the brand section is fully dynamic in terms of like if you type something in in the middle of the show, you can do that and show it at any time during the show.

I'm guessing what you mean is like the ability to pull in information from like some other source and have that maybe update the lower third.

If that's what you mean, it'd be helpful for you to confirm that.

But yeah, I think that's a really cool idea along with a live scoreboard, giving folks more flexibility to sort of integrate sources of information into their stream is an interesting 1 for sure.

And just to confirm, because I think you said the brand section, it's the banner section where you can just type stuff up, but again, I'm guessing, he already knows that.

So for example, they'll be watching, let's say you're watching a soccer or football game and somebody scores, you just create a new banner or edit the existing banner, update what the score is, post that.

Maybe you want to have it in the top center or something, you wanna have some kind of dynamic overlay set up for that.

Don't have that now, but interested in maybe adding something that would allow you to do that.

Army Podcast says, feature request the ability to have a live counter of subscribers or name new subscribers to YouTube.

Army podcast, like being able to sort of call people out that subscribe.

Yeah, we definitely want to continue improving our integration with YouTube.

We did recently add, it's not this feature, but in some ways related, some new features for YouTube when it comes to, when there's like a new, like the milestone that your members are able to send out, you now have the ability to feature that on the stream.

But yeah, definitely wanna continue improving things with the YouTube integration.

Yeah and we do say when someone becomes a member so a paying member yeah would be kind of cool to have subscriber call it as well I'm not sure if that's something YouTube exposes that we could access but will be pretty cool.

Maurice says, is there a cost for this service?

We have both free and paid versions, Maurice.

So free version is pretty feature-rich, so you can try the vast majority of the product out to see if it's a good fit for you.

But for all the details, if you go to streamr.com slash pricing, you can see the differences between sort of the free and paid tiers.

John says, any closer to interfacing with Rumble and Kik?

So Rumble specifically, John, doesn't have a API to integrate with, at least at this time.

I'll have to look at Kik, but I think it's the same story with Kik.

Both you can stream with RTMP though, so as a custom RTMP destination.

If they do ever add APIs, it's something that we're open to if there is demand for that.

Joshua says, question, any chance for audio video markers during the live stream to help with editing, adding timestamps to the backend after the live stream?

Do you want to take that 1, Dan, while I look for some other questions?

It's not something we're working on right now, but it is something we're open to adding.

1 thing, well, I'm actually, I'm just thinking if I have any follow-up questions.

I think we understand the use case pretty well, and maybe this type of thing where we do it as a hotkey, but then also something you could potentially click somewhere to do it.

So I guess I'd be curious, is there a preferred way you'd like to add markers?

Is it just hit a hotkey, or does it have something on the site where you want to click?

Let's do a couple more before getting into the feature announcement, and then we can get back to some of the questions.

Movie and Game Lover says, hey, for this new feature, is there still a way to invite guests to StreamYard with the record only functionality?

That's 1 of the really cool features of the recording options on StreamYard is it works very similar to how you live stream, right?

So like if all the brand section, like all of the cool functionality of Streamr, you have full access to in the record only mode.

So if you wanna have guests or multiple guests, you can absolutely do that.

There's the studio link, which is how you invite the guests.

It's just in the case of a record only, There's no YouTube link or public link in that sense.

All right, let's do 1 more and then we'll do the feature update.

Creative Lady says, can we upload MOV files into the brand tab?

Not at this time, Creative Lady, but it's definitely something that we wanna do and that we're continuing to look into, especially for the transparent effects that you can do with MOV files.

Yeah, there's just some trickiness with various browsers, but we're hoping to sort that out.

All right, let's get into the announcement for tonight, which is recording controls.

So this has been asked about for a super long time, really excited to add this.

We have a video that will walk through the details and then we can definitely answer any questions or suggestions you guys have.

Any other thoughts on this, Dan, before we roll the video?

Yeah, I guess just as a precursor, some of you I'm sure are already aware of this because we did ship it a few days ago.

So a lot of times on the town hall we'll talk about a feature that we're either just shipping right now or shipping later in the week or something.

In this case it actually already rolled out near kind of the middle of last week.

So you can already play around and test it out if you want.

Yeah, let's roll the video and then we can answer any questions you might have.

I'm so excited to announce that we just launched recording controls.

Recording controls bring so much additional flexibility to the recording studio.

Instead of doing 1 long take that you might have to edit, you can now create clips by pausing, canceling, and restarting the recording studio.

Recording controls will only work on recordings.

When you're in a recording studio, you'll see the new buttons up top, near the broadcast button.

You can pause, resume, restart, or cancel your recording.

Pausing allows you to put the recording on hold.

Useful if your doorbell rings and you need to answer it mid-show.

This is perfect if you want to take a break, think about what you want to say, and then resume.

You can cancel the recording which will delete it.

Restart will delete your last take and resume recording.

If you have a destination connected to your studio, recording controls won't be available.

Recording controls also work with local recordings.

Once you're finished creating a recording, we'll merge all of your clips together into 1 recording.

You might not even need to edit, but if you do, we have an editor for that.

We're excited about this feature and we can't wait to see your recordings.

So yeah, if you guys have any questions about the new functionality, definitely let us know.

Like Dan mentioned earlier, everybody should have access to this already, right?

But yeah, let us know if there's any questions, anything else to add to that, Dan?

So, just to reiterate, I think a few key points there, I think the video covers it really well, but a few points.

So the first 1 is, it is called recording controls for a reason.

There are no streaming controls and that's just because, like Dana mentions in the video, you can't pause a live stream.

It's just a feature that platforms don't have.

You can't pause a stream on Facebook or YouTube, for example.

So if you want to pause a stream, we'd recommend just showing an overlay, removing yourself from the stream if you need to take a quick break or something.

But with recording, it is super convenient to be able to just pause, go do something, or if there's a noise in the background, and then continue on later.

And Dana covered the restart and cancel pretty well.

It's basically, I want to do multiple takes.

I want to make sure I get my recording exactly right.

And many of you have actually already tried it out.

Glad you're looking forward to it, Studio.

It sounds like Elizabeth had a chance to try it out and it worked well.

Worked well, great, Elizabeth, happy to hear that.

Awesome, Maryann, glad you're looking forward to it.

Sounds like MuttNuts had a chance to try them as well.

Super happy that it's working well for you, MuttNuts.

Trying to see if there's any questions about it.

Yeah, I definitely remember that Corrine has been been a while super excited to to finally release it Sounds like Hector had a chance to use it too.

Awesome It's great Chantel Marissa says perfect for a few projects.

She's working on that's great to hear Pete says it would be great if the pause put in chapter markers.

Just out of curiosity, Peter, you're talking like for post-production, so you're editing, you want to know where you paused basically?

Or is it some kind of like when you share the link on StreamRoute Apertures, you want to have basically the equivalent of like YouTube sections based on when you pause?

I assume it's the former, but if not, let me know.

Like if I was doing a video, knowing like where I recorded each segment that I actually used makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, and right now they are basically stitched together, I would say.

So for example, say you're doing a 10-minute recording, and 5 minutes in, somebody knocks on the door, something you want to pause.

You pause, come back a couple minutes later, resume.

The final output will obviously not have that two-minute section, but it's all 1 recording.

So it'd be 1 10 minute recording with the paused part completely removed, but it's not 2 separate recordings or anything.

That is something we may add later though.

Awesome, let's see what else we had here.

Let's Talk says feature requests, local recording, the option to save everything to the host device.

So I'm guessing Let's Talk, so right now it is technically saving it to the host device in order to capture that high quality, but then it's uploading it to StreamYard in the background.

I assume what you mean is like also at the same time sending it to your own device.

I would be curious, like the main benefit you get out of that, just to understand for myself better, because you'd still would have to deal with, like if you were recording with another person you'd still have to figure out a way to get that audio file to you so I'm just curious is it just like having to wait to download it on StreamYard or what the benefit would be for you?

Yeah or maybe are you just recording by yourself in which case You just want it to be a little faster, but you don't have to worry with the server side stuff and having to download it.

Holly says, have you guys been working on a VU meter?

I think it's a volume meter for all guests to level up volumes.

Yes, that one's definitely been coming a lot, especially as we've added more recording controls and functionality around podcasting.

So it is something that we're looking into and is making it easier for folks to figure out before they actually hit record or go live to understand exactly how loud everything is and how exactly it's gonna sound.

So it's something we're looking into for sure.

Yep, I definitely get the pain point on that 1.

Hey April, I see your comment, you had some issues with the virtual backgrounds and touch up in terms of like the performance.

So they are features that are gonna use additional compute from your computer.

So like that is something, you know, unlike the multi streaming that is happening on your own system versus stream yards.

It is something that we're gonna continue to make better and optimize more and more, so it will get better over time.

But if you are having issues, that would be my best bet, is that it's just basically a lot, maybe if you have an older computer, if your computer's not older, that would be helpful to know.

But if, I think I know, I was gonna ask if you could, I think I already know your email, so I'll look at the, you said you submitted tickets to support, I'll look at those to see if I have any additional insights.

But if it's not working out, I would keep trying it in the coming months, because we do have a team that's a big priority for them right now, just making it work better and better and better on all types of devices.

So that even if someone is on a low power device, that it will work great.

Yeah, we're constantly trying to optimize all kinds of stuff and just make it as performant as physically possible.

They're already fairly performant for running in a browser, but we want to get it as good as we possibly can.

Marianne says, when using the pause feature, can we use the change camera setting?

Yeah, you should be able to use essentially every setting you would in StreamYard.

Joshua said, Would a Chrome extension help with hotkeys interface with SY?

So we do have hotkeys on StreamYard, Josh.

I think maybe you're referring to an integration with an audio interface or a stream deck or something like that.

We do just have to make sort of like a, not really an app, but kind of like an app to interface directly with something like a Stream Deck, which we do want to do eventually.

It wouldn't be a Chrome extension, but it is something that we can do.

But yes, in theory someone could write a Chrome extension to change the hotkey functionality in some way or really anything with any website.

Oh, you mean like their own Chrome extension?

That integrates with Stream Deck and uses the Stream Deck hotkeys.

It's pretty, it's a fair bit to it, but yeah, it is possible.

I think there's some earlier questions I missed.

Vibe Show says, I'm not seeing the touch up feature in my camera settings.

If you click settings and then click camera, there should be something that says touch up my appearance.

If it's not showing up for you, I would just, if you go to streamer.com slash.

So right now, if a device doesn't support it, we don't show the setting.

We'll probably change that just to make it clear why it's not showing up.

But particularly if you're on mobile, we don't support mobile with TouchUp right now.

Then also certain devices, like if you don't have a graphics card, For example, you won't see that option.

We're hoping to add it for mobile, by the way.

We won't, I don't think, add it for laptops that don't have a graphics card because they can't really do it.

But mobile hopefully is coming relatively soon.

And Chris on Facebook, I see a question from you about billing.

If you just go to Streamr.com slash contact and go to the live chat, they will help you immediately.

Andrew was asking if there's hotkey support.

And I believe it's for right now pausing and restarting and then canceling.

Pausing and resuming, I should say, sorry.

I don't think we have 1 for restart yet, but there are hotkeys.

And they're not set by default, I don't think.

So you can't just accidentally press a key and suddenly have it pause or restart or something.

You have to actually set up the hotkey yourself first.

Maurice says, thanks, I have another question.

Can I use the streaming platform to broadcast on a typical network TV broadcast?

In terms of how you do that, it's going to depend on basically just your setup when it comes to the television station.

So if you do have a production setup where you're able to take in an RTMP feed, that would be 1 way to do it.

But yeah, it basically is gonna depend on your setup.

But yeah, we've definitely seen StreamYard being used when it comes to, we've seen it in a few Netflix series, which is pretty cool, and then in segments of TV shows as well.

So it just depends what your setup's like.

Yeah, it's pretty common to take like a recording from a StreamYard broadcast, for example, and just show it as a segment in a TV show.

John says, is there any way to have local recording and cloud recording check boxes on for everything by default?

Unfortunately, we haven't had these and have missed some prime repurposing opportunities.

Yeah, so for cloud recording, there is no checkbox.

But then there's like a backup audio cloud recording that gets turned on whenever you turn on local recordings.

1 thing I'd just be curious, John, I totally get the pain point there.

It sucks when you think it features on and it's not.

I'd be curious if you're doing recordings or streams because with recordings, it should save your previous setting.

And then if you never turn it off, it should just stay on.

With streaming right now, we don't keep it on.

That's something we're thinking about changing.

There's just some people that have it on when they're doing a stream where they're not necessarily using it, so it shouldn't necessarily be on.

So we're trying to find a way to kind of optimize for those different use cases of, hey, I'm doing a stream and I really need it versus I'm doing a stream and I accidentally turned it on, it can actually make the quality slightly worse if you're not careful.

So yeah, I'm trying to optimize for that.

But let me know if they have predominantly live streams, you already said in the chat.

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Ask StreamYard - Recording Videos Is EASY With This Update! (#241)