Stabliity or quality of stream?

I'm curious, what would you rather prefer... a stable, lower bandwidth stream with no buffering, pauses and/or skips or an HD quality stream that may have some buffering, pauses and/or skips involved?

That's an interesting question. Are you asking because we can only have one or the other? IMO, pauses and skips are the worst to deal with. However, am I correct in assuming that with ample bandwidth at all points, there shouldn't be a need to choose?

Odd, I thought I responded to this, but I don't see it anywhere.

To me, avoiding skips or pauses is most important. But if the quality is less than SD, I'd probably get comments on that. Kind of a no-win situation.

I would prefer a stable, lower bandwidth stream with no buffering, pauses and/or skips,

stable and lower bandwidth stream as long as long as it is SD level videoquality is much more important.

The reason why I was asking is because in my stake, I'm the STS and the highest upload we get is about 1.2M. Now while this should be enough to broadcast a decent looking stream, I don't trust it always staying at that high a level. Over the past 2 years, we've had problems with our internet at our stake center with it dropping to to around 500k and then coming back up or just dropping entirely. We have since changed our ISP and it seems to be stable. I still don't trust it though cause in test it has dropped down past 700k.

Last stake conference I was determined to have it work. So I set the bitrate to encode at 500k. I did not want the thing to skip, pause, or buffer in any manner....and it worked. Now while the picture quality wasn't HD, the members were able to hear the messages all the way through without problems. It was a first in 2 years, so I was thrilled. Now we are wanting a better picture.....but I don't really trust the system. I would rather have a stable, continuous stream that plays all the way through.

Now I do get complaints/comments that the stream wasn't HD. But I always counter, would you rather have it pause or skip? The answer is always no.

If with enough bandwidth that acts properly, there is no reason why a higher quality of stream couldn't be played....but we just don't have it at our stake yet. Oh and did I say I also don't trust the bandwidth to stay up there.

In any case, we are working on ways to try and make those darn dips in bandwidth irrelevant so that skips, pauses, and buffers won't occur as much.

Most if not all the cameras the Church is installing in new Stake Centers are SD cameras. I would recommend SD video even if your camera has HD capabilities. An SD stream upload/download needed is 1.5 Mbps/1.0 Mbps, but for HD you need more like 4Mbps/2.1Mbps. If your buildings can really handle HD and have a HD camera why not use it, but even though I myself am someone that cares a lot about quality, I would opt to use SD if I knew it would lessen a chance for failure. Audio is more important for a webcast as if there was no video the message would still come across, but with no Audio there would be no message. That is why it’s important to have an audio backup solution ready in case the webcast fails.

For me, if I can maintain the sound with no drop outs, that is so much preferred. However, I would like to have a focused picture for the members to see, but dropouts and buffering can lose the spirit of a great talk. There are some talks that just suck you in and you are hanging on every word and if there is a pause and you lose something then that talk becomes useless. So lower quality video with no drops is better for me. I would find the upper limit and then pull it back a notice or two.

Just my feelings.

Unless you have super high quality HD cameras at the source location and HD capable projectors at the recieving locations you are wasting your energy. Seems like the Achilles heel of the solution will remain so-so SD cameras at the stake center and cruddy SD computer projectors at the chapels.

sammythesm wrote:Unless you have super high quality HD cameras at the source location and HD capable projectors at the recieving locations you are wasting your energy. Seems like the Achilles heel of the solution will remain so-so SD cameras at the stake center and cruddy SD computer projectors at the chapels.

I have to disagree. I started webcasting in HD (720p) years ago with nothing more than a home video camera on a tripod, with a vanilla notebook PC at the receive end tied to a projector with a VGA cable. Audio was fed to the sound system using a crab box. Since then, our projector has been updated and now (besides being a little brighter) includes HDMI inputs, but it's basically the same process.

Mikerowaved wrote:

sammythesm wrote:Unless you have super high quality HD cameras at the source location and HD capable projectors at the recieving locations you are wasting your energy. Seems like the Achilles heel of the solution will remain so-so SD cameras at the stake center and cruddy SD computer projectors at the chapels.

I have to disagree. I started webcasting in HD (720p) years ago with nothing more than a home video camera on a tripod, with a vanilla notebook PC at the receive end tied to a projector with a VGA cable. Audio was fed to the sound system using a crab box. Since then, our projector has been updated and now (besides being a little brighter) includes HDMI inputs, but it's basically the same process.

Hope that wasn't misunderstood. What I mean is that the optics of the camera, the lighting, the resolution at the source (etc) determines so much of the quality downstream. If you're capturing video at 360p with bad lighting or uncalibrated camera settings, it doesn't matter if your infrastructure is running 1080p or 720p - you can't upscale poor quality at the source. So when I say 'waste' - and maybe that's too strong a word - what I mean is that if you're infrastructure is running 1080p at 30fps but your capture is 360p at 15fps and your projector/display is XGA/800x600 or 1024x768, you are wasting a lot of processing power in the middle there just to upscale something that will be unappreciated and unobservable at the far end due to limitations.