Can I use the Webcast Receiver to receive Regional General Conference

So, we have a regional Stake Conference coming up soon and I have been told that Salt Lake will be broadcasting it via satellite and a webcast. I plan on using the webcast for 2 of the three buildings in our stake.

But, the WebCast receiver thin clients do not support the ability to type in a specific URL. It's tied directly to the WebCast Broadcaster and only allows me to type in Unit number and broadcast id.

I have a few options that I'd like to know plusses and minuses: 1) Can I rebroadcast the Stake Conference satellite broadcast to the other buildings as we do for regular Stake Conferences? 2) Is there a way to upgrade/tweak the thin clients to allow for access to the URL/Windows Media player/etc? 3) Any other suggestions laptop settings to make it work "best"?

Thanks in advance

Last Sunday, my stake participated in a regional broadcast stake conference. Like you describe for your stake, we met in 3 buildings, our satellite receiver equipped stake center and 2 remote meetinghouses capable of webcast reception.

We use stake-purchased laptops to receive webcasts, so I don't know if the webcast receiver can be configured for non-stake URLs. I would recommend just using laptops running Windows Media Player.

Our Stake President asked that we webcast the local portion (welcome, opening hymn and prayer, and stake business) of the meeting to the remote buildings and then, after the regional broadcast, have the presiding officer at each location conclude the meeting.

To handle the switch from local to regional feeds, we considered having the 2 receiving locations remain connected to the local stake webcast and switch the source at our webcast communicator from our in-house A/V feed to the satellite feed. In fact, we tested this during the 1 hour pre-broadcast test period and it seemed to work fine. So I believe that the answer to your first question is yes.

During the testing, we found that the laptop operators could switch URLs between the stake webcast and the regional webcast with minimal disruption (ctrl-u to bring up the WMP URL dialog box and select the regional webcast URL from the URL history). After switching, the wait for buffering to occur was much shorter than what we normally see when opening a webcast feed originating from our communicator. So we ultimately decided on having the remote locations switch at their end. Having them receive the regional broadcast directly from HQ also avoided several possible points of failure that would have existed had we gone the re-broadcast route.

Regarding Windows Media Player settings, there is nothing that we have had to change. If the OS on the laptop has support for presentation mode, make sure it is turned on, in order to avoid software update notices popping up during the broadcast. Otherwise, make sure to check for updates (Windows, Java, Adobe Acrobat and Falsh) beforehand.