About Stream Manager

How it's built

Stream Manager is built with substantial help from Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) and GitHub Copilot. I'm a front-end developer by trade with only a cursory understanding of backend systems, and building a full Electron desktop app with multi-track video processing, ffmpeg integration, OAuth flows, and cloud-aware file handling is well outside my normal scope.

Claude handled much of the architecture, implementation, debugging, cleanup, and documentation across months of iterative back-and-forth, while the product direction, UX decisions, feature scope, testing, and final calls on what ships are mine. If you'd like to see a fully hand-coded project of mine, take a look at ClpChk. If you're curious about my take on AI-assisted development, I'm happy to chat in GitHub issues or on Discord.

Portable and self-contained

Stream Manager is a single portable executable. There is no installer: download it, unzip, and run StreamManager.exe from anywhere, including an external drive. You can move it freely without breaking anything.

Your settings are stored in your Windows AppData folder, and each stream's data is kept right next to its files. Your library stays portable and self-describing even if you relocate the app or move your recordings to another drive or machine.

Your data

Stream Manager runs locally and needs no account to use. Your recordings, metadata, settings, and any API keys stay on your machine. Connecting YouTube, Twitch, or Claude is optional, and data is only sent to those services when you explicitly ask for it, such as publishing your metadata, running the relay, or requesting an AI suggestion. Even then, only the specific data that action needs is sent.

A note on Windows and code signing

Stream Manager is not signed with a commercial code-signing certificate. Those certificates are expensive and mostly serve large vendors, so a free, open source project ships unsigned for now. The first time you run it, Windows SmartScreen may show a "Windows protected your PC" warning. Click "More info", then "Run anyway" to launch it.

Because the whole project is open source, you can review exactly what it does on GitHub before running it. You can even have an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT review the code for you. If you want to build it yourself, see the GitHub repository for instructions.