We have reviewed several screen-capture applications in the past. So far, none of them except Ambrosia‘s Snapz Pro X functions with our satisfaction. Actually, Snapz Pro X is not that perfect, either, because the software developer has not been able to solve the Final Cut Pro incompatibility issue for years whether they are trying or not. How about shinywhitebox‘s iShowU? We reviewed it in August, 2007, right? A major problem that we found with iShowU 1.44 was that the application did not fully capture all frames. It never captured more than 24 frames. Therefore, Final Cut Pro users were not able to edit the video clips recorded with iShowU.

shinywhitebox has recently released a new shareware title. It’s called iShowU HD. The latest version is 2.0.2. At its website, the software developer writes






The pinnacle of realtime capture. Faster than ever with more features to boot!

Create tutorials, make a demo for the web, record your favorite game (World of Warcraft!), collaborate on UI design, show tech support what’s really going on with that broken program.






Recording favorite games? Really? Even Snapz Pro X doesn’t always function properly when it comes to games. Well, then… Let’s see how iShowU HD works. 

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After launching iShowU HD, let’s open Preferences at first. You can find Preferences under iShowU HD. (See Screenshot 01.) Also, you have an application menu on the menu bar, under which you find Preferences. (See Screenshot 02.) Now, let’s see what we have under the General tab. The top option is Hide when recording starts. You definitely want to enable this option, or the application window will remain open while you record desktop activity. The second one is Countdown before recording. This option is not very useful unless you want to take a deep breath before recording. I’ll tell you why. If you initiate recording with this option enabled, you will see a count down as shown in Screenshot 04. The screen gets dark and remains this way during the count down. And you cannot open a hard disk volume on the desktop. You can’t double-click on a file on the desktop and open it. How about Show status in menu bar? Should we enable this option? Well, we will cover that soon.

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Now, let’s move on to the top menu on the application window. And let’s click on the drop down menu to the left. If you want to capture the entire screen, you can just choose the very bottom one. (See Screenshot 05.) But what if I want to capture just 1200 x 900 pixels starting from the top left? Let’s click on Choose and see what happens. Now, I can manually change the screen size. (See Screenshot 06.) But there is no way of my telling the exact size of the selected screen area.

Okay. Let’s click on another drop-down menu, right above Output video. (See Screenshot 07.) If I go to Change size, I can shrink the size of the screen-capture movie to 2/3, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 or enlarge it to 1 1/2 or 2x. I would need more options under an old computer where I used to shrink the 1,200 x 900 screen to 75%. So some users may not be happy with these settings.

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iShowU has an interesting feature that Snapz Pro X doesn’t have. It indicates the location of the Mouse pointer with animation when you actually click. iShowU HD supports the same function. (See Screenshot 08.) The color of the circle is green. But why green? Can we change it? No, not to my knowledge. If you want to disable this function, click on Advanced. Under Mouse options, click on the drop-down menu next to Make sound on click. Then choose None. (See Screenshot 09.)

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So how do you select a video compressor? You can choose Video Options under the pull-down menu above Output video to bring up QuickTime’s Compression Settings. (See Screenshot 10.) You can also bring up Compression Settings by opening Advanced and clicking on Change under the QuickTime tab. (See Screenshot 11.) Likewise, you can select an audio compressor by pressing the button under Audio. As you see in Screenshot 12, iShowU HD doesn’t support uncompressed audio, which makes Final Cut Pro not very happy. For them, the best choice may be Apple Lossless or Linear PCM.

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All right. Are you ready to test-record the desktop movement? Well, all you have to do is just to click on the red Record button. Wait, wait! How do you stop the recording? If you choose to display the application menu on the menu bar, as shown in Screenshot 02, you can select Stop capture. (See Screenshot 13.) If you don’t, you can use the shortcut key. Let’s open Preferences again and then click on the Shortcuts tab. The default combination for ‘Stop recording’ is set to Shift + Command + #2. (See Screenshot 14.) Bad news is that the shortcut key for ‘Stop recording’ doesn’t always work no matter how you set it. If you hide the application menu on the menu bar, you may not even be able to stop the recording, right? Actually… Click on the application icon in the Dock if the menu is not displayed on the menu bar. Then iShowU HD’s application window will come back to the desktop, where you can click on the Stop button. (See Screenshot 15.)

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When you stop the recording, iShowU HD will compress the video and create a temporary file. This temporary file, which appears at the bottom of the application window (See Screenshot 16), will remain in the system unless you delete it. Once compression is done, you will get the final copy. Wait, where do I find it? The default location is Users > User > Movies > iShowU HD >. If you open Preferences and switch the tab to Storage, you can change the default movie location. (See Screenshot 17.) But… Be warned that the application may freeze itself. I made several attempts. And the application became inoperable and unresponsive a few times after I opened the file browser. (See Screenshot 18.) In such instances, I was forced to press Command + Option + ESC.

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So… Does Final Cut Pro read iShowU HD’s video clips? Let me try reading one video clip, which I compressed with H.264, with Final Cut Pro. If I open Format on this clip, Final Cut Pro says the frame rate is 24. (See Screenshot 19.) That’s promising, right? If I open the sequence and drop the video clip… Oh, no… General Error, Final Cut Pro says. The canvas is red. (See Screenshot 20.) Honestly, I have never seen the canvas like this before. If I double-click on the video clip itself… Final Cut Pro says General Error again. (See Screenshot 21.) Then it says Error: Out of Memory. (See Screenshot 22.) Then… Final Cut Pro crashes. (See Screenshot 23.)

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Let me try another video clip. This time, I’m going to select the preset that says 1920×1080 24p for Final Cut Pro to screen-capture the desktop movement. (See Screenshot 24.) The video compressor is Apple ProRes 422. And I got a video clip whose file size is 94.5 MB. As shown in Screenshot 25, Final Cut Pro reads it with no problem.

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All right. Finally, let’s see if iShowU HD lets me record a game play video. I’m going to use Electronic Arts‘ SPORE to test it. After launching SPORE, I’m going to press Command + Tab to switch to Finder. Then I launch iShowU HD. As shown in Screenshot 26, iShowU HD records video on the active screen. But what Screenshot 26 doesn’t show is that this video doesn’t contain audio from the game. We don’t test all Mac games out there. But we can say it doesn’t work for SPORE.

iShowU HD is a promising screen-capture application. But there are several problems. Recording favorite games? Oh, no… I won’t do it with iShowU HD because it fails to capture audio at least for SPORE. Final Cut Pro reads iShowU HD’s video clips if they are compressed with Apple ProRes 422. But Final Cut Pro may not read video clips that are compressed with H.264 and possibly others.

Another major problem we observed while playing with iShowU HD is its instability. If you bring up the file browser, the application can become unresponsive. In a couple of occasions, I was obliged to press Command + Option + ESC to force-quit the application.

By the way, if the software developer reads this review, I strongly suggest they fix the folder permission of ‘ishowuhd’ on its web server. The CHMOD is probably set to 755, which allows visitors to view the content.

MacHouse recommendation: There is no way we can give iShowU HD a ‘Buy-It! recommendation because it’s not very stable. Avoid it? No, we won’t say that because iShowU HD is quite promising. But we won’t use it for now.






iShowU HD and iShowU HD Pro are products of shinywhitebox.

*The software application we have used is a demo version that is available at software developer’s website.

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References:

Mac Software Review: Screenium 1.0
Mac Software Review: Screenflick 1.6.2
Mac Software Review: Screen Mimic 2.1
Mac Software Review: iShowU 1.44