Tech Forum

Mikerowaved wrote:

russellhltn wrote:The Webcasting function was designed to serve stakes, not wards. Even if you work around the need for multiple Vidiu units, I'm not sure as you'd be able to have more than one meeting at the same time.

An alternative (not for the timid) would be to use a fairly robust notebook (Windows, Mac, or Linux) running OBS Studio with a USB 3.0 (minimum) video capture device, such as this one* or this one* on Amazon. (Not recommendations, just examples.)

.

Experimenting with OBS and wondering if you had an OBS profile that contained the settings you used for output, especially to ensure max bitrate isn't exceeded? I am ok with "not for timid" statement.

Thanks.

Greetings. I split this off the other topic so we could discuss OBS in more detail. I included more info than you requested for the benefit of those new to using the free Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) with the church's Meetinghouse Webcast (MWC) 3.0.

First of all, in OBS Settings --> Output , select Service as Custom.... From the MWC Event Setup --> Other page (only available for upcoming events), copy/paste the RTMP URL and Stream Name , to the OBS Server and Stream Key fields. Don't check Use authentication.

In OBS Settings --> Output you can keep the Output Mode at Simple. Set Video Bitrate to no more than 2200 kbps (this limit may be higher real soon ). For the Encoder, select Hardware (NVENC) if you have an nVidia encoder equipped video card*. If not, select Software x264. Set Audio Bitrate to either 64 or 96.

*To see if your nVidia card or mobile processor has an encoder/decoder chip, go to Wikipedia's List of Nvidia graphics processing units, select your video card or mobile video processor, and record the "Code Name". (Also available with CPU-Z or similar utility.) Compare that with this Nvidia NVENC wikipedia page to see if it's on the list. While some cards as early 2011 supported NVENC, the implementation was not nearly as good as later cards and you might get better results just using software encoding.

Here's a quick setup draft we created for OBS. I hope it helps. This just provides the basic setup for OBS and does not get into some of the more advanced features.

Appreciate the document. I don't know if I would have been able to figure out the keyframe interval. It worked tonight in a quick test. I have a 5 Mbps upload connection in this Stake Center building, and set it to 500 Kbps for testing. Broadcast overview showed 558/500 kpbs for current/target encode rate.

Thanks again.

The standard encode receive rate for the webcast system is 2Mbps. If you want to go up to 5Mbps you can but will need to select the "High Bandwidth Encode" option when scheduling. It is important to note that right now our highest transcode rate for remote connections is 2Mbps, so going above that really doesn't do a lot for you. The high bandwidth encode option was put in place to accommodate RTMP streaming from services like Zoom. Zoom encodes around 4Mbps, so in order to get it to work on the Church's system you will need to select the high bandwidth encode. Many are using Zoom to the Church's system weekly with great success. This does require a paid Zoom account. I am working on a simple instruction sheet for setting this up.

bartj wrote:...right now our highest transcode rate for remote connections is 2Mbps, so going above that really doesn't do a lot for you.

So, a 5Mbps encoded uplink signal can't pass through unchanged to high BW receive sites? I don't follow the logic. Isn't NOT transcoding less work than transcoding?

I think the question is how are cloud services charged? With multiple streams, the outbound bandwidth could be significant.