Receiving Locations Freezing at Same Time

We did our first stake conference webcast yesterday Sunday 1/29/12 at 10 AM Eastern time and ran into an issue where all our receiving locations froze at the same time (as far as I can tell since they all called me at about the same moment). The receiving locations had to reconnect to the stream and it worked fine after that. I'm guessing since I did not have to restart the webcast at the sending location that everything there was working fine. The fact that it happened at all 3 receiving locations at about the same time leads me to believe it was not an issue at the receiving locations. We never saw this issue during testing. Has anyone else experienced this and found a solution/workaround to prevent this from happening?

The only other issue we noticed was poor video quality. When displayed on a tv it looks ok, but projecting it was pretty bad. I'm sending using the Medium setting in the webcast software due to the large bandwidth requirements on High setting. Has anyone been able to get good enough projection quality video at Medium setting. If so, what type of camera and video capture device are you using?

Our setup
Sending location: Sony Handycam TRV250 connected to Dazzle usb capture card via composite video on a Dell Windows 7 laptop.
Receiving locations: Laptops connected to projector.

Thanks in advance for your help.

tamnteresa1 wrote:We did our first stake conference webcast yesterday Sunday 1/29/12 at 10 AM Eastern time and ran into an issue where all our receiving locations froze at the same time (as far as I can tell since they all called me at about the same moment). The receiving locations had to reconnect to the stream and it worked fine after that. I'm guessing since I did not have to restart the webcast at the sending location that everything there was working fine. The fact that it happened at all 3 receiving locations at about the same time leads me to believe it was not an issue at the receiving locations. We never saw this issue during testing. Has anyone else experienced this and found a solution/workaround to prevent this from happening?

The only other issue we noticed was poor video quality. When displayed on a tv it looks ok, but projecting it was pretty bad. I'm sending using the Medium setting in the webcast software due to the large bandwidth requirements on High setting. Has anyone been able to get good enough projection quality video at Medium setting. If so, what type of camera and video capture device are you using?

Our setup
Sending location: Sony Handycam TRV250 connected to Dazzle usb capture card via composite video on a Dell Windows 7 laptop.
Receiving locations: Laptops connected to projector.

Thanks in advance for your help.

I have not used Medium setting on the webcasting software, because I have designed my system and network to handle the video feed. We currently use the Sony EVI-D70 camera that the church has on it's website and the picture quality was excellent. When I did my first webcast, I used a TV capture card, but for this next round, I will be using the OSPRY 260e card in a Dell Studio with AMD 6 core processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM and Window 7 64 bit.

One difference between the camera you used and the EVI-D70 is the pixels. The EVI-D70 Effective Pixels is 768X494 and the camera that you are using is 320X240. The higher the number the better the quality. I know of another stake that has this camera with the OSPRY card, I believe, and their video quality is excellent.

So I guess what I'm trying to say, is if you want great video quality, then we need to spend the money to get the higher end stuff to make the experience good.

I have also seen this freezing issue (once) in my tests. I also restarted the receiving client and everything was a-ok. Must have been a hiccup in the encoded stream or something... I blame Microsoft (as often as possible).

Regarding the quality - I've also seen a big quality delta between "Medium" and "High" - but my tests have also shown that encoding in "high" is really more CPU intensive than network intensive. The increased network traffic is really still handle-able by most broadband, but the M$ encoder software just chews CPU like crazy.

If your camera (or capture card) isn't capable of capturing at 640x480, it's may still be worth it to go to high (might see cleaner video and fewer artifacts). You might also consider upgrading your capture card or camera, too - but only do so if you feel like you have the spare CPU and BB to go up to high.