Meetinghouse Webcast, Low Buffer - WARNING

Today during our adult session of stake conference I began getting emails with the following error message.


Meetinghouse Webcast, Low Buffer - WARNING

During the webcast the webcaster actually disconnected from streaming at least three times. We never had this problem before and I have no way to troubleshoot what the root cause is.

The only thing I can think of is the webcaster being behind the church firewall is causing latency and not filling the buffer fast enough to keep up with the streams. When I did the speed test from then webcaster I’m getting just over 5 megabits ps on a 100 meg internet connection.

Any information that can be provided on this week and a troubleshooting process would be helpful.

Don't know whether this is relevant to your situation, but at least some versions of the webcast transmitter would misbehave and/or shut down the stream if they got too hot. I was told the solution is to take the case off it to allow airflow. (For good measure, pointing a small fan at the unit might not be a bad idea.)

If your stake might be open to an alternative service, please search the forum for mention of a firm called Sunday Streams. I have no connection with the firm other than as a _VERY_ happy customer. For the quality of their infrastructure and the excellence of their customer service, I consider their fees to be very reasonable.

What device are you using to webcast? I noticed the vents and mounting of the VidiU and mounted it vertically so it could breathe.

Our first stake conference webcast since the software update was last week and we had epic failures at 50% of receiving locations. Called Global Support this week to troubleshoot and requested level 2. Today, we ran a test webcast and discovered two things that aren't found anywhere in the 'How-to Guide' documentation that looks like it will help us a ton.

On the receiver browser when not in Full Screen, click on Stats which brings up the reception telemetry data under the window. On the bottom right of the video pane, you should see a "Max Buffer Level (secs)" drop-down. Ours has been defaulting to 30 seconds which should be fine but we were getting lag even on 25 mbps d/l internet and wifi off. We saw a repeat of our issues from last week. We set it to 120 secs and just like that, it's 100x better.

We also played with the settings for Video Quality but that seems finicky as it would reset to Auto when we were playing with the Buffer setting. We had normally been webcasting at 2300 kbps as we have 1080p cameras and will encourage receiving sites to force reception to 1471 kbps, which seems adequate for video quality on a projection screen.