Meetinghouse Webcasting and Cisco 881W Firewall Issues

Did anyone have any issues with webcasting on the weekend of 15&16Oct2011

We did at a Stake Conference in central Florida, USA - had nothing but issues

Saturday Issues:
Did a test webcast on Sat pm, 15Oct2011

[list=1]
[*]Issues with the normal first time webcast to remote meetinghouses with a new Sony video camera
[*]The Cisco 881W firewall ran out of IP address (or DHCP stopped giving IP address)
[list=1]
[*]Called LDS Global Service Center - IT Support at 19:27 pm EDT, Saturday 15Oct2011 and after being on hold for eighteen (18) minutes, gave up on the call, assumed that they were in their closed period (Saturday night until Sunday afternoon (EDT))
[*]Firewall has a standard configuration (62 IP Address)[/list]

[*]Local Sony SNCRZ50N TCP/IP (PTZ) camera image was great
[*]Note: local unit did a test webcast on the prior Sunday with some Sony video camera settings that needed adjustments[/list]
Did a live webcast on Sun am, 16Oct2011

Sunday Issues:
1) Video was very poor quality and sometimes choppy
2) Audio was fair
3) The Cisco 881W firewall ran out of IP address (or DHCP stopped giving IP address)
4) Local Sony SNCRZ50N TCP/IP (PTZ) camera image was great
Things tried:
[list=1]
[*]Powered off the Cisco 1041 wireless access points (AP) to stop any possible network activity
[*]Restarted webcast software
[*]Restarted laptop with webcast software
[list=1]
[*]Changed webcast setting from High 16x9 to High 4X3 (Suggested Upload speed: 1.7 Mbps)
[*]Changed webcast setting from High 4X3 to Medium 4x3 (Suggested Upload speed: 0.896 Mbps)[/list]
[/list]Work Around:

[list=1]
[*]Changed to a Meetinghouse Webcast Communicator box and by-passed the firewall
[*]Lost about 10 minutes of the meeting (hymn and one speaker)
[list=1]
[*]Changing video and audio cables
[*]Changing network cables to by-pass the firewall with permission of the FM group)[/list]

[*]Note: Regional Facilities Manager had a webcast communicator box in the local vicinity and was able to provide it[/list]
Technical Information:
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
ISP Name: AT&T
ISP U-verse
Speedtest,.lds.org upload: 2.23 Mbps


Meetinghouse Webcast Software System:
LDS Meetinghouse Webcast Version: 3.0.0.101
Microsoft Expression Encoder 4, Version: 4.0.3205.0 with SP1
Microsoft .NET Framework Version: 4.0.30319.01
Roxio Easy VHS to DVD (USB capture appliance): 2.0.123
Roxio Express Labeler: 3.2.1
Roxio Video Capture USB: 1.22.0
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 Service Pack 1
User Name: ldsweb (no password)
Workgroup: LDS
Computer Name: TOSHIBA1 (private laptop)
AVG 2012 (Anti-virus) AVG Technologies: Version: 12.0.1831
ZoneAlarm (Firewall) Check Point, Inc: Version 9.2.106.000Laptop:
Manufacturer TOSHIBA
Product Name Satellite C655D
Serial Number 7B347377Q
Windows System Assessment
CPU Score 2.80 (Calculations per second)
Memory Score 4.90 (Memory operations per second)
Graphics Score 4.10 (Desktop performance for Windows Aero)
D3D Score 5.50 (3D business and gaming graphics performance)
Disk Score 5.90 (Disk data transfer rate)
Disk Space Disk C: 259 GB Available, 285 GB Total, 259 GB Free
Physical Memory:3 GB, 2.663 GB Total, 1.583 GB Free
Memory Load 40%

Sony SNCRZ50N TCP/IP (PTZ) camera:
Video Output and streaming:
NTSC (Composite) (no S-Video)
Resolution: 711x485
MPEG-4 and JPEG compression, H.264 (cannot be viewed using a browser)
NetworK:
10Base-T/100Base-TX (RJ-45)
Remote controllableCamera cabling to Roxio USB capture applianceFrom camera BNC connector,
using coaxial RG-6 cable to satellite cabinet with anadapter to RCA connector

Pete, I didn't have to do webcasting last weekend, because my stake conference is at a different time of year. However, let me see if I can help you.

first of all, you didn't give us specs on the laptop that you were using. Second, I would turn off the Anti-Virus and the ZoneAlarm because both of those could be taking cycles. Second about the firewall running out of IP address or DHCP not giving them, there is a way around that. That is to set the laptop up to have a static IP address instead of getting one from DHCP.

Also, I would test your speed with http://www.speedtest.net to confirm that you are getting a 2.23 upload. I also assume that you are pulling the video directly off the camera instead of coming across the network. The other thing that we did leading up to a stake conference was testing. I tested at least three times before the actual weekend. We discovered that we had an issue during the weekend, but everything went well.

We used a Dell XPS Studio PC that had an AMD 6 core processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM. The CPU use was, I think 25%. So CPU speed and number will affect this application very much. My stake president is having issues with his PVC because I believe that the CPU is being maxed out.

harddrive - thanks for the suggestions

Anti-Virus and the ZoneAlarm - good suggesstion, during our testing we had no issues with them

Laptop information - added it to the posting, we only had three (3) GB of memory

www.speedtest.net - ran speedtest.net and the upload speed was almost the same as speedtest.lds.org

harddrive wrote:Also, I would test your speed with http://www.speedtest.net to confirm that you are getting a 2.23 upload.

I'd think http://speedtest.lds.org/ would be more relevant since it tests speed to the church servers.

pete.arnett wrote:Laptop:
Manufacturer TOSHIBA
Product Name Satellite C655D
Serial Number 7B347377Q
Windows System Assessment
CPU Score 2.80 (Calculations per second)

The Toshiba C655D came in a variety of flavors, depicted by the dash number that followed. Looking at your Windows CPU Score, I would guess this one came with an AMD E-Series processor, which is on par with the Intel Atom CPU line. They are easy on battery consumption, but rather weak on performance. Video processing takes a good amount of raw CPU horsepower to keep from dropping frames and making the picture "stutter".

On another note, I've have very poor success getting the Roxio USB video capture device to deliver a smooth video image on anything but the "Low" and "Minimum" resolutions. This was on both a notebook PC and one of the new Dell admin PC's using the church's Webcast software. Still deciding whether we need to opt for one of the Osprey video capture cards.