JonesRC wrote:Would love to hear more feedback.
For members who do not have general conference available in their home, we show all sessions over the satellite in the stake center. For October 2012 we decided to use the Roku (Mormon Channel) instead of the satellite because 1) better resolution and 2) better audio particularly for music (stereo). We used a stake owned sound system instead of the building system. In addition to the English stream, we had a second Roku streaming (video and audio, although we only used the audio) in Spanish which we feed to the interpretation transmitter. We did this for all 4 general sessions. The Roku's were connected to wired internet.
It went well. I learned the following:
1) The "stream" starts at the beginning of the 1 hour "pre" session feed. If you start it 30 minutes prior the live session starting time you need to fast forward to the "live" time.
2) I needed to briefly pause one of the streams to get the English and Spanish in sync (Spanish listeners watch the "English Video" on the projector in the chapel)
3) At one point in one session the Dish BYU channel feed at my home cut out for a minute or two, but the Roku's at the chapel streamed flawlessly for all 4 general sessions.
Both streams worked fine on a 12 to 15 Mb cable internet connection. I think I used "SD" instead of HD for the Spanish stream since we were using it only for the Spanish audio.
For the Priesthood Session we used a similar setup but switched to laptops streaming from lds.org (using a special password protected site--we had the Stake President get the password), since it is not on the Roku, although I wonder if there is not a secure way to access that on the Roku also. (How does the Stake President request that access?)
Lessons learned:
1) I had a TV setup in the RS room connected to the satellite system in case we had a need for it. With no prior notice, 5 minutes before the meeting a deaf brother came in and requested closed captioning. The satellite was about 1 minute ahead of the internet stream, so it would have been very distracting to put the satellite TV in the chapel. I ended up putting him in the RS room alone. (I did not like isolating him that way!) I noticed the next day that closed captioning was available for the lds.org stream in beta for this conference and understand it will likely be ready for the April conference.
Overall, streaming worked well. Video quality is better, but I'm not sure most viewers really noticed it. Choir and organ audio quality was much better than the satellite/chapel sound system. It was a certainly more setup work than just using the satellite feed.
Suggestions: Since the Roku supports 5.1 audio, it would be nice to have a stream available with stereo English, then say, Spanish, Portuguese, and another common language. This would basically replace the satellite system and keep audio synced, but I suppose that I'm one of the few who would use it...
Overall, the Roku's streaming the Mormon Channel for General Conference worked very well.
