Simulcast Stake Conference

We had a virtual stake conference where the server didn't allow more then 500 people to view the stream, I was told that it could handle 3000. Above 500, members received an error and couldn't watch. I am bouncing around the idea of streaming to the churches platform but then maybe to YouTube(or another service) to ensure everyone can watch and have a back up. Does anyone have any experience with this? What have you used?

davidry wrote:We had a virtual stake conference where the server didn't allow more then 500 people to view the stream, I was told that it could handle 3000. Above 500, members received an error and couldn't watch.

What server, and how long ago? The current church servers don't have a problem going above 500.

Depending on how you source the stream, you may be able to send two streams as the same time, but you'd need twice the upload bandwidth.

About a month ago. US West 2. I reached out to tech and they said it was a rare bug where there is no solution yet.

Bandwidth isn’t an issue.

davidry wrote:About a month ago. US West 2. I reached out to tech and they said it was a rare bug where there is no solution yet.

I would just use another region.

I discovered that I can simulcast to both the church webcasting system and youtube using ffmpeg to copy the rtmp stream from the church backend to youtube. I run this on my personal virtual private server, so it uses no extra building bandwidth whatsoever (and I have plenty of vps bandwidth).

ffmpeg -i rtmp://churchurl/streamname -f flv -acodec copy -vcodec copy rtmp://youtubeurl/streamkey

I run that in a screen or tmux session so it won't die if I lose my ssh connection. Could run it locally, though, using twice the upload bandwidth.

torriem wrote:I discovered that I can simulcast to both the church webcasting system and youtube using ffmpeg to copy the rtmp stream from the church backend to youtube. I run this on my personal virtual private server, so it uses no extra building bandwidth whatsoever (and I have plenty of vps bandwidth).

ffmpeg -i rtmp://churchurl/streamname -f flv -acodec copy -vcodec copy rtmp://youtubeurl/streamkey

I run that in a screen or tmux session so it won't die if I lose my ssh connection. Could run it locally, though, using twice the upload bandwidth.

Could you give a bit more detail on this? First, how are you broadcasting from the building? Do you send the RTMP directly to the church servers from the building, and then your private server picks up that same stream and copies it to youtube?

Correct. We are using the Teradek Vidiu to push directly to the Church's webcasting system in the normal way. Then I use ffmpeg to pull that stream down from the church backend and copy it to youtube. The RTMP url for the church's back end is the same as the address that is listed on the portal under "teradek manual settings." Both youtube and the webcasting portal break the RTMP url into two parts, the url and the stream name or key. Just put the two parts together with a slash (/) into on url for use with ffmpeg.

The Church webcast system does not have a cap at 500 in any region. We run events ever week in various regions with more than 500 without any problems. Please DM message me if you want to talk more about this or have more details you can provide about the experience you had.

Hi all,

Another simpler option is https://restream.io . It's less than $15/month for the monthly "Standard" plan which allows you to connect to a Youtube account + 1 custom RTMP destination (the church system).

I have a broadcast TV & web development background and I've had a tough time (better read, it's worth the $15 one-time fee to not reinvent the wheel) with a DIY solution for syndicating a live stream.

I've used this back in November for simulcasting a political debate for the local NBC station I work with. It had no problems at all.

Our next Stake Conference will be the end of January and we are planning on using Restream to send to the church system and Youtube as a backup. Although, I've heard from members in our stake that a lot of people have found Youtube to be much easier to use and more reliable for playback (better automatic video quality adjustments with poor internet).

Last conference about half chose to watch on the church system and half on youtube. About 300 connections on each. From what I've heard the experience people had was pretty good on both systems with a slight preference for youtube. The church system has improved a lot in the last year or so. Youtube is better at adapting to lower bandwidth. Our stake president is just anxious that we have redundancy in our broadcasting methods as we've had lots of issues in the past. But lately things have been working quite well. Our wards are pretty happy using the church system for their meetings. It's nice to not have to give out urls and codes every week.

A reason I prefer YouTube is it's easier for less technical people to view the streams on their TV with by using a Roku, AppleTV, etc and not needing to hook up a laptop.

But I agree, the redundancy is important as I've had issues with the church system more regularly, but I've also had random issues with YouTube (even today).

How about 4 streams at once if needed...

We were using the Teredek encoder to broadcast to the church system and it was riddled with problems so much so, that we thought it was our internet. We had been using the Teredek for the last 2 years and it was never that great. It finally got so bad that I had to jack the encode rate down to 700kbps to even have a broadcast that didn't stutter and drop frames too much. I was ready to buy another Teredek but did not want to because they are so expensive when I read on this forum where someone recommended a different encoder for much less than the Teredek ($228) and it is amazing!!! You can even get the $188 version. We bought another one as backup now.
We now broadcast at 2400 without any issues and those on the receiving end have been getting a much better experience.

With all that said, This same encoder will broadcast 4 streams at the same time. We currently broadcast 2, one over YouTube and one over the church system for redundancy. Though I prefer to use the church system, for right now, it is good to have options as some viewer's mobile devices do better with the YouTube app.

The encoder that has worked so well for us is the:

URayCoder HEVC H.265 MPEG4 H.264
(https://www.amazon.com/URayTech-Protoco ... 919&sr=8-5)

If anyone has any questions, I'll be glad to elaborate on our setup. It has made a night and day difference. And before anyone recommends that we didn't have the Teredek setup properly; I assure you, we had tried every setting possible. I even had the head guy from church headquarters trying to make it work when we had a regional conference and it failed miserably. What a horrible experience that was. The second I switched to this new encoder...flawless. Smooth and triple the encode rate. Can't say enough. We have used it now broadcast 3 sacrament meetings each Sunday for the last several months without issue.

Patrick Walker
Billings Montana East stake
powlds69@gmail.com

Thanks for posting about that device. I wish I'd seen it a few weeks ago! I bought a bunch of similar-priced encoders for our wards, but this one would have been better.

After the church Webcast system completely failed for us on Sunday for a special stake-wide broadcast with the local Area Authority, our Stake presidency has zero confidence in the Church webcast system now, so we'll be simulcasting to Youtube from here on out for any Stake meeting. On this particularly disaster, everything went fine until the opening prayer when the "media server" icon started blinking red on the webcast dashboard, and all viewers reported video stuck. the RTMP feed itself seemed fine.

We ended up recording it on a cell phone and posting it to youtube after the fact. The system has worked fine for weeks, and for all the ward broadcasts that morning so I didn't even think about simulcasting to youtube for this. Lesson learned, though. I might even want to find a way to use zoom as a third backup system.

What kind of problems did you encounter with the Teradek?

We’ve had a good experience using Webcast 3.0 and the Teradek, Once we corrected the contractor’s errors installing the Teradek and after we tested our broadcast solution 12 times over a six week period!
(Trying to transmit an HDMI movie using HDMI In on the A/V Rack threw us for a loop (green screen). We Had to go from computer HDMI Out through a VGA converter and use the A/V Rack’s VGA In in order to broadcast the film clip. I know the AV rack has an encoder and the HDMI input must be conflicting with the encoding or creating a problem that the Teradeck doesn’t like.)

We have not tried a YouTube broadcast solution because we need church A/V support, if something goes down during stake conference.

I was asked last night if we could have recorded our local stake priesthood leadership session we broadcasted. I’m not aware of that being an option using webcast. Anyone know for sure?

#THAWK

thawkins3 wrote:Trying to transmit an HDMI movie using HDMI In on the A/V Rack threw us for a loop (green screen). We Had to go from computer HDMI Out through a VGA converter and use the A/V Rack’s VGA In in order to broadcast the film clip. I know the AV rack has an encoder and the HDMI input must be conflicting with the encoding or creating a problem that the Teradeck doesn’t like.

Most likely you were running into a copy protection issue. Your string of converters stripped off the copy protection. To do a good test, I'd suggest going from your camera. You can point the camera at a TV if you need "action".

thawkins3 wrote:We have not tried a YouTube broadcast solution because we need church A/V support, if something goes down during stake conference.

I'm not sure how much help they'd be. I think you'll find a number of people here who have moved to YouTube because it works and the church webcast system has let them down.

thawkins3 wrote:I was asked last night if we could have recorded our local stake priesthood leadership session we broadcasted. I’m not aware of that being an option using webcast. Anyone know for sure?

There's no option for that, but if you have the event code, there's frequently something you can view for a short time afterwards - perhaps a week.

Thanks, Russ.

I read how copy protection could cause the green screen on the forum and we tried different sources, some which I am sure were not copy protected, And we always received the same result. I will try your test.

thawkins3 wrote:I read how copy protection could cause the green screen on the forum and we tried different sources, some which I am sure were not copy protected, And we always received the same result. I will try your test.

I'm not entirely sure how the system works. The copy protection might be applied by the device and not necessary by the media played. In other words, the HDMI output of the DVD play may be copy protected regardless of the disc used.