Postby jeremywillden » Sun Oct 11, 2020 10:17 pm
Anyone else had the experience that when you stop the stream for the Sacrament that YouTube redirects your viewers to other religious videos on YouTube (not from our church)? We did during our first video test streams a few weeks ago, and while it might be somewhat amusing for a test, it's not ideal to have your viewers redirected against your will. I believe it can be avoided by configuring a "repeating" event and using it, instead of a one-time scheduled event, but...
I used to use only YouTube for our Stake events because of all the problems we used to have with the Church Webcast site, but have kept trying to see how it has improved. Last year we simulcasted Stake Conference on both the church webcast site and YouTube, and both worked very well for us, so with the "redirection" issue, we've been using the church Webcast system now with great results, and even written automation scripts to automatically configure and start OBS Studio (I've posted about it elsewhere on the forum if you are interested). While still not quite as good as YouTube, the Church Webcast system is looking quite good these days. Kudos to the development team - while I wouldn't have built it on Azure, it's better than it used to be, and appears to be set up to scale as much as needed.
OBS Studio has far more flexibility on configuring bitrates, so for our building with only 768k upload speed, a 500 kbps video stream plus 32-48 kbps audio works, as long as you've disabled WiFi in the building. While I use a pretty sophisticated setup for Stake Conference (with equipment I own), OBS Studio on an inexpensive older computer works very well for weekly meetings. We're using 2009-era iMac computers purchased surplus, at a cost of $50 each, including adding a second Gig of memory. Running Ubuntu brings new life to old computers and saves a lot of machines from the landfill, while saving cost. Even a Raspberry Pi (with a camera, SD card, case, cables, and so on) costs more.