# Vidrio Vidrio (vidr.io) was a small desktop app for "holographic" screencasts. It showed your webcam video on top of your whole screen, semi-transparent, like a reflection in a window ("vidrio" is Spanish for glass). You then shared or recorded the entire screen with any tool (Zoom, Teams, Meet, QuickTime, OBS), and viewers saw your slides or your app with you standing behind them, pointing at things. Its tagline: "Screen sharing just went holographic." Important: vidr.io no longer works. As of October 2026 the domain doesn't resolve (the registry has it on `clientHold` since an August 2026 update), the last release dates from February 2021, the Mac App Store listing returns a 404, and the UK company behind it, Vidrio Limited, was dissolved on 23 May 2023. What follows comes from the archived site, a frozen copy still online at vidrio.netlify.app, the founder's CV and the Hacker News launch. Don't confuse it with vidrio.com, an unrelated company. ## The problem it solved Classic screencasts put your face in a small rectangle in a corner, or they cut between "you" and "the screen". Either way, you can't point at anything, and you hide part of the slide. Vidrio's idea: put yourself BEHIND the content at full size, so your gestures, gaze and expressions become part of the explanation. Look at the camera to address viewers; look at the content to pull their attention to it. The site targeted education ("flipped classrooms, online courses"), remote presentations, and sales or support demos. ## How it worked 1. Start Vidrio: it overlays your webcam on the screen, like a mirror 2. Open whatever you want to present (Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint, your own app, a browser) 3. Share or record the **entire screen**, not a single window (the most common support question: viewers only saw the window, not you) 4. Present, using hotkeys to change opacity or pause the overlay No export or import step, and viewers didn't need Vidrio. ## Key features - **Opacity slider** from "just the screen" to "just your face", plus pause/unpause ("mute for your face") - **Size and position** of the overlay, display selector, webcam selector - **Background removal** (beta): the "weathercaster" mode - **Virtual camera support** (beta): use a phone as the camera through Iriun Webcam, or ManyCam effects - **X-Ray pointer** (Windows): moving the mouse reveals the slide behind you - Customizable keyboard shortcuts (control + option + p to pause on Mac) - Built-in screen recording on Windows (v1.0) ## Pricing (archived) - **Free**: everything, with a "Made with Vidrio" watermark - **Pro**: $9.99/month, no watermark; available as an in-app purchase on the Mac App Store from v1.23 (February 2021) - **Enterprise**: a joke tier ("Military-grade encryption. HIPAA compliance. Audit logs. Nope, we don't have any of those.") The privacy policy (2020-07-21) said the webcam feed never left your machine; the app used Google Analytics for usage metrics and checked for updates. ## Maturity and timeline - **2017-01-16**: vidr.io registered. Already shared on HN in October 2018 as "Tony Stark's presentation tool" - **2020-03-21/22**: Vidrio for Mac launched on Product Hunt and as a Show HN (19 points, 4 comments). Jim Fisher made it free for remote work during COVID-19 - **2020-05-19**: Vidrio Limited incorporated in London - **2020-12-18**: Vidrio for Windows v1.0 (an `.appx` package downloaded about 1,370 times from the public release repo) - **2021-02-10**: Vidrio for Mac v1.23 (Pro on the Mac App Store, native Apple Silicon). Last release - **2023-05-23**: company dissolved - **2026**: domain on hold, App Store listing gone. No Linux version ever shipped ("Not yet... stay tuned") Closed source, proprietary license. No open-source code to pick up. ## Who's behind it Jim Fisher (James H. Fisher, London), a developer and former product manager at Pusher. His CV says he ran Vidrio as CEO from April 2020 to February 2021 and grew it "from $0 revenue to a maximum of $1600/month", building the Mac version in Swift and the Windows version with Electron and WebGL. He then started TigYog (a tool for writing interactive online courses) and later worked on AI search at Slite. His Show HN comment gives the origin: "I saw Tony Stark's holographic display and thought, 'I want that.'" ## Limits and caveats - **It's dead.** Even if you find an old installer, there are no updates, no support and no way to buy Pro - **Full-screen sharing only**, which exposes notifications and everything else on your desktop - **Readability**: a translucent face over text costs contrast; you have to tune opacity per slide - **Background removal** was beta; without a clean background, the overlay adds visual noise - No reviews beyond launch-day enthusiasm. The Product Hunt page is behind a CAPTCHA, so I couldn't read its comments ## Relevance for my content (YouTube, courses) The tool is gone, but the idea is still good for teaching. A presenter who points at the exact line in a note or a diagram feels more like a classroom than a talking head in a corner. Vidrio pitched itself at "online courses" for that reason. I record on Linux and Windows, and Vidrio never shipped for Linux, so I'd rebuild the effect in [[OBS Studio]]: a webcam source over a display capture, opacity through a color correction filter, a background removal plugin or a chroma key, and a hotkey to toggle the scene. Recording camera and screen as separate tracks keeps the choice for the edit instead (that's the approach [[OpenScreen]] and most screen recorders take). ## Alternatives - **[[OBS Studio]]**: free, cross-platform, can reproduce the overlay with scenes, opacity filters and a background removal plugin; more setup - **macOS Presenter Overlay** (built into macOS since Sonoma 14): puts you over the screen you share during video calls, in a large or small overlay - **Loom** and similar recorders: camera bubble over the screen, simpler, no "behind the slides" effect - **mmhmm (Airtime)**: presenter-plus-slides compositions for calls and recordings - **[[OpenScreen]]**: open-source screen recorder for polished demos - **[[NVIDIA Broadcast]]**: background removal for the webcam feed on Windows with an RTX GPU, to combine with OBS ## References - vidr.io (unreachable as of 2026-10-03; DNS fails, WHOIS shows `clientHold`, last updated 2026-08-12, created 2017-01-16) - Frozen copy of the site (homepage, features, pricing, FAQ): https://vidrio.netlify.app/ - Download page and latest release notes: https://vidrio.netlify.app/get - Blog (release history up to v1.23, 2021-02-10): https://vidrio.netlify.app/blog/ - Privacy policy (2020-07-21): https://vidrio.netlify.app/privacy - Terms and conditions (Vidrio Limited, London): https://vidrio.netlify.app/terms - Wayback Machine snapshot of vidr.io (2022-06-11): https://web.archive.org/web/20220611173000/https://vidr.io/ - Show HN: Vidrio, a holographic screencasting app (2020-03-22): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653587 - Hacker News, "Vidrio, Tony Stark's presentation tool" (2018-10-16): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228287 - Product Hunt (behind a CAPTCHA, not readable): https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vidrio-for-mac - Jim Fisher, launch post on X (2020-03-21): https://x.com/MrJamesFisher/status/1241424901564760064 - Jim Fisher, CV (Vidrio role, revenue, tech stack): https://jameshfisher.com/cv/ - Vidrio for Windows release assets: https://github.com/jameshfisher/vidrio-assets/releases - Companies House, VIDRIO LIMITED (12610968, incorporated 2020-05-19, dissolved 2023-05-23): https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12610968 - Mac App Store listing (returns 404): https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vidrio/id1209843625 - Apple Support, Presenter Overlay: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105117 ## Related - [[OBS Studio]] - [[OpenScreen]] - [[NVIDIA Broadcast]] - [[YouTube (MoC)]] - [[YouTube tips]]