Streaming gear upgrade

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Streaming gear upgrade

snaddy

Hi Joel, Much appreciation for the service you provide. I lead a ministry and do livestreaming daily. My current setup;

Mackbookpro 2.6GHz 6-Core, i7
Software Encoder: Wirecast
Camera: Canon XA35
Audio Mixer: Yamaha MG12XU
Camera to Mackbook: SDI to HDMI Converter

I am having very bad sync issues, frequent and intermittent live streaming interruptions, latency issues and sometimes the videos speed up.

I realize the need to use a hardware encoder.
My challenge:

I travel quite a bit and do take the equipment with me. Sometimes the internet service is very bad where I may be. I could benefit from the HEVC/H.265 equipment like the Teradek VidiU Go but though your recommendation said it could be used with a third party restreaming service, I found out I'll have sign up with their core or sharelink service. I could benefit greatly from the network bonding feature of the H.265. I considered your other recommendation for a H.265 encoder, the Magewell Ultra Stream SDI, but I'm leery of it because of the only review on BHphotovideo. The reviews on the HDMI version of the same unit is not impressive.
I will need a graphic presenter as I interactively present scriptures and other text during streaming. I'm not sure how I'll integrate that in my setup.
A good schematic setup diagram.

Your help will be highly appreciated.

Samuell

joelwsmith

snaddy

Hey Samuell. Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the community!

First, you may want to try making the best of what you have. I would start by doing these things:

Clean (keyword) install macOS on the MacBook Pro
- This will make sure you're starting off with a fresh setup and nothing in the OS/software is slowing the computer down
Find out what resolution and bitrate works best on your MacBook Pro (this will take some experimenting)
- Start with a small resolution like 640x360, a low bitrate like 1000 kbps, and a low quality/speed (Ultrafast) and see if any issues occur. If that works well, then increase the bitrate and quality slowly until you start to see drops or other issues (the resolution doesn't matter as much at this point, so I would keep it at 640x360 for the testing). That will give you an idea of your system's capabilities. Then you can bring the bitrate back down by at least 25% to give you some headroom.
- Bitrate is your most important setting. The higher the bitrate, the more processing is required by the computer to keep up, and the better the stream will look.
- Quality (speed) is your second most important setting. The slower the quality setting, the more processing is required by the computer to keep up, and the better the stream will look.

That will possibly get you better results with what you have now, at least until you can upgrade (if desired).

It sounds to me like you could benefit from either a Resi or a Boxcast subscription if you often run into unreliable Internet connections. Both of those platforms offer a protocol that gives your stream a "buffer" to allow for any network issues that happen during the stream. You can read more about both of their protocols below:

Another benefit to Resi is you can use Renewed Vision's ProPresenter 7 to stream directly to Resi with their Resilient Streaming Protocol, so that may be a good option to keep everything in a single laptop setup.

These options are not necessarily cheap, but they are about the best options when it comes to streaming on less reliable Internet connections.

snaddy

I appreciate your suggestions. I'll implement and report back.