So I have been playing around with Usteam.tv for a while now and found it to be quite interesting and decided to dive into it a little further. Sure, watching me sitting in front of my three computer screens is probably slightly entertaining, but I wanted something more. I thought up the idea to use a type of Picture In Picture approach to the problem.. [This would need to be done through a Virtual web cam that took two or more inputs and combined them into a "Virtual web cam" of sorts]
The search was on! After an hour so of google searches I found very little on the net about free programs that I wanted to use.. Most of them looked sketchy (like they would have spy ware and such embedded in them) I was soon to come across this gem named WebcamMax. From the initial look at the screen shots from their site, I was a little iffy, but I thought I would give it a try.
After downloading the 7.5MB file, I was ready to install, The setup went quickly and was a Simple point and click next installation (something even your mother can do). Now that the program was installed, it was time to load it up.
The initial layout seemed very professionally laid out and might I say, almost beautiful. The brushed aluminum look that is put on by default was not to my general taste, but I was completely surprised and happy to find the 14 other skins that came pre-installed with this program. You can change the skins by going to View > Change Skin > And select one of the 15 pre-installed themes. (My favorite happens to be the “Simple Dark” theme)
Again after speaking of the interface, I must point out the small other factors I almost instantly noticed with this program, The menu’s actually had animations, the buttons themselves had smooth fading and clicking animations that made it aesthetically pleasing to go through when changing options. Another note was the neat effect of the window itself “Sticking” to the sides of the screen when you moved the window close to the side (I am a big big fan of this and I thank the makes of this program for putting it in!)
Using the program itself was as simple and straightforward as it looks! It took me a grand total of probably 25 seconds to get the Picture in Picture feature working. The even cooler this about this is that you can move, resize, stretch and do all sorts of things to the screen in real time! Here is a screen shot of the program running after the initial setup and 25 seconds of fiddling around..
As you can see, the program is working flawlessly with my Video Capture card and Web cam together with the PiP (Picture In Picture) Very impressive if I must say so myself!
There are so many uses and applications that this program could be used for that would just take too long to explain here! You may as well go try it out yourself here: http://www.webcammax.com
And if you’re like me (weary about spending a lot of money on a program, you can try out thier different tiers of the program From 6 months all the way up to a lifetime of license support (for ~$49 this is not that bad! Think of how much the last game you bought was!)
Overall I would Highly reccommend this to anyone who is looking to have a little fun with thier webcamming experiance! The pricetag is not that bad at all for all of the features and ease of use. My only dislike so far is that I cannot figure out how to save presets (so the picture and picture defaults back everytime) but once you know how to set it up, it takes no more than 15 seconds to get things working again.
Again, I hightly reccommend this product to anyone looking for a Picture in Picture effect with a webcam and or multiple video devices or inputs. Check it out for yourself http://www.webcammax.com