Hello everyone!
This has been a weird month for everyone, and here at ManyCam there are a lot of changes being made to better accommodate working, teaching and keeping in touch with friends and family from home.
Due to all of this craziness, I wanted to make a post to update the community on what we’re doing to help you continue to stay safe while also staying productive.
Support tickets and queue
Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen a massive influx of new users, this initially was a strain on our support team and caused some delays in responding to tickets. Over the past week, we’ve added to that team and are aiming to reduce response time as much as possible.
We are continuing to monitor this internally and we will add more resources as we go to keep up with demand.
Virtual Backgrounds and Background Blur
Last week, we released a brand new feature for Studio+ users that allows you to have Virtual Backgrounds and Background Blurring without a green screen. This feature is brand new, and we wanted to get it out to our users as quick as possible to accommodate everyone who is working from home. We will be updating this feature, improving quality, performance and hardware support as much as we can constantly.
If you have any questions, comments or feedback on this feature please let us know either by email or by posting here and we will get back to you as quick as we can!
As with any release, but especially in such demanding times, the goal is to have something up and running as quickly as possible for you, so the UI, functionality and settings of Virtual Backgrounds might change on a day to day basis.
NDI Support
This is a highly requested feature and we just wanted to keep you guys updated on development. We’re working on implementing NDI support as quickly as possible but due to Covid-19 there have been some delays.
The plan is to implement support in two phases, the first phase being NDI as a video source in ManyCam, and then phase 2, where ManyCam would be able to be used as an input in another software. Development will be starting on this soon and we will try and keep you posted on timelines.
Webcam Cropping
In the next week or so, we will be adding a way to crop the Webcam video source, this will allow you to crop out parts of your video that you might not want people to see so they can focus on what is most important, you!
Performance and bug fixes.
In parallel with the above, we also wanted to let you know that we’re monitoring performance on Windows and Mac through support tickets and internal testing and are planning all new developments around making sure ManyCam works well on all desktops, laptops and mobile phones.
Improvements we make change on a day to day basis and we release fixes to manycam.com/beta as quick as they become available to us, in the future, when things start to get back to normal this will be the primary place to get the latest builds of ManyCam that might include brand new features, experimental performance enhancements and beta releases.
Virtual Webcams being blocked on Zoom for MacOS
This is another thing we’re trying to get resolved, due to an update in Zoom, a MacOS feature has been enabled that restricts Zoom from loading plugins that aren’t digitally signed by either Zoom or Apple.
What was removed was the “Disable Library Validation” entitlement.
Mac users may have seen this issue last year when Google Chrome inadvertently blocked Virtual Webcams, but since then Google has resolved this and moved the webcam capture to a different process where they added the “Disable Library Validation” entitlement allowing that specific process to interface with the ManyCam plugin.
If anyone would like to follow how the Chromium team did this, you can check out the Chromium support ticket here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=990381
We’re currently in contact with Zoom, Apple and others on how to get this resolved. We hope, through mutual cooperation, Virtual Webcams like ManyCam will be able to be used again with these applications.
So far this issue doesn’t affect other popular applications like Skype, Skype for business and others but we are monitoring the situation and will provide updates as we get them.
In addition to the above, we’re planning tonnes of new features, improvements and huge changes to effects to make live streaming, conferencing and just keeping in touch with loved ones easier.