Not too long ago I began tinkering with live online streaming as an adjunct to my YouTube videos. The reason I was so interested in it is because I wanted to conduct live online interviews with respected individuals of the alternative energy movement and, more specifically, HHO. The first time I ever really felt a need for this type of broadcast was when I was at the Jarboe's Mill AEPC event last year interviewing some of the exhibitors there.

There are a fair number of services that offer free online streaming to small broadcasters like myself. It didn't take me long to discover that Ustream was by far and away becoming the most popular, perhaps leveraging the similar sounding name to YouTube. Not long after that I began to discover other uses for the Ustream service besides just raw streaming. And so was born the weekly Zero-Labs online telecast.

In keeping with my desire to conduct live online interviews I looked into Ustreams' co-host feature. Let me tell you about Ustream co-hosting. Don't waste your time. Latency between host and guest is well over 20 seconds, completely unusable. What I needed to find was an application that allowed me to put received Skype video as a picture in picture for rebroadcast.

Now I don't do MAC. I do windoze (not misspelled) and I do Linux. If Dreamweaver were easily ported to Linux under WINE, I'd abandon windoze altogether. But since I'm still chained to the oh-so-bloated operating system, to conduct lively online interviews from a distance I needed to find a way to stream with picture in picture.

There are quite a few webcam software packages available to the public but none so robust as my newest can't-live-without program called Webcam Max published by Coolware Max. Now, there are other programs that offer many of the features found in Webcam Max, some even freeware. These features include cool visual effects, distortion, frames, masks that automatically sense facial features and follow the subject in real time, text overlays and replacement backgrounds.

On the subject of backgrounds, Webcam Max, like some of it's competition, allows you to take a snapshot of the background without you in the frame and replace that chromo key with any image or video of your choice. Of course, the less complex the background behind you for that snapshot the better. The best color to have behind you is the famous green screen. Once the snapshot is taken, it can be replaced by the software with you superimposed in front of the new backdrop. It's very cool. You can be somewhere else, do your own weather broadcasts, newscasts, etc. But as I said, there are other programs that offer these features.

So what sets Webcam Max apart from the pack? PinP, or picture in picture. If you've got enough computing horsepower and I/O, you can have as many as 16 PinP sources! These sources can be other webcams with different camera angles, still pictures, videos, desktop views, you name it.

After installing Webcam Max, applications that would normally use available video hardware devices see Webcam Max as just another hardware resource. By selecting Webcam Max as the resource rather than the resource itself, that's when the fun begins. Virtually any set of video sources can be mixed into one stream and fed live online or even recorded locally using windoze movie maker and other video editing software.

At $49.95 for a lifetime license, this program is easily worth the price. The GUI is far more intuitive than most freeware counterparts. My only criticism for Coolware Max is their license key business model. They only allow you to have the program license activated on one computer which means you can't use it on a second machine at all, even if you never use both at the same time, without purchasing a second license. License keys are validated online or by communicating your hardware key to them so they can send you a matching activation code.

And with ever more feature rich freeware nipping at their heels, they may want to drop their price quite a bit else lose the sizeable market share foothold they now enjoy. One freeware in particular, if they ever adopt PinP, Webcam Max is history unless they find another way to monetize their business.

All in all, I am still very pleased with my purchase and satisfied with the value. You'll be seeing me use the special features of Webcam Max for an increasing number of live and recorded videos, including YouTube.

Webcam Max gets 4 stars out of 5. Click here to download a free 30 day trial. Tell'em Z sent you.

All the best,
Z