Postby johnv » Tue Oct 06, 2020 1:00 pm
There has been a lot of confusion on this topic, at least in our area. I've been asked to help our ward out.
The week before our first Sunday's broadcast, I had setup a youtube channel to take care of the broadcast and all was working well in my tests. We were then told NOT to use a live streaming service like Youtube or Facebook Live so I switched to Zoom and it worked great for our first broadcast, except I had to diligently monitor the screen the whole time on my laptop prepared to shut off anyone's video if they joined with it on. You can then disable it for the rest of the meeting if they do turn it on, but you can't disable it until they turn it on (so weird for zoom to do it that way). So I much prefer the option to use youtube now that we are told it IS approved to use. You can auto-disable audio in Zoom once you start the broadcast, but you have to remember to do that after you start your video event, then chose the checkbox to auto-mute all for that event, but hopefully that's a mute point now that we can use youtube live.
Youtube works well, except in my case, I believe the church firewall is doing something to the stream as it will crash after about 10 minutes and then I have to start a whole new session with a new URL. Has anyone come up with a solution for that issue (or maybe I'm doing something wrong)? Are you sharing the link to the event or to your channel. I feel that sending viewers to the channel is better in case anything goes wrong with the direct link, they can still find any updated meeting broadcasts in the channel?? Thoughts??
Our STS is checking the filtering level that our building, but I still suspect it may be doing some filtering with youtube.com, otherwise the only other issue could be upstream bandwidth.
I can't recommend highly enough to use the building sound instead of a webcam or omni mic, audio is the most important aspect of a meeting, it doesn't matter how well your video is if you can't understand the speaker it will only frustrate the viewers. So make sure you have a sound feed going into your stream from the building sound system. In our case, we had to tap into the pulpit mike with an xlr splitter cable and run it into a mini mixer with USB to plug into the streaming laptop. I recommend you do a full walk-through and test it out with someone viewing your test streams for good audio and video, there's nothing worse than running into issues during the meeting!!
Good luck, and hopefully we can all learn a thing or two on here and share our experiences.
John
