Tech Forum

The church's webcast totally failed on us last time so we are not going to use it.

Tried to set up Adobe Live, but it doesn't appear to have a full screen client (just a small screen in the upper right hand corner).

Any other ideas? What is everyone using (BESIDES the church webcast software/servers)?

Why are you giving up on the Church's webcast? You may find there are enough successful users in these forums to help resolve any issues you may be having. The same reasons you may have difficulty with webcast will most likely affect any other possible solution you may come across.

The primary reason the Church has deployed the webcast units and software is because there is no other cost effective solution out there that meets the needs of the Church.

Last conference we had I tested the setup for several hours between buildings with no problems.
Then right from the start of the conference I had connection errors with the server every few minutes.
I couldn't seem to keep it connected.
As far as I can tell their servers were overloaded and were kicking me out.

That is why I don't trust it anymore.

If you didn't disable the wireless, the members may have been overloading your bandwidth. If that's the case, no solution is going to prevent that. You have to pull the plug on everyone else.

RussellHltn wrote:If you didn't disable the wireless, the members may have been overloading your bandwidth. If that's the case, no solution is going to prevent that. You have to pull the plug on everyone else.

Not only the wireless but ALL connections except the broadcast. We ran into the same problem when we didn't do this.

corbettdl wrote:Not only the wireless but ALL connections except the broadcast. We ran into the same problem when we didn't do this.

Yeah, that's what we did at the broadcast point and had it tied to ethernet only.

Also, we were monitoring the connection and it had no issues pushing the data, wasn't even near capacity.

So my guess is the church systems were slammed and couldn't hold connections.

stelring wrote:So my guess is the church systems were slammed and couldn't hold connections.

It's possible they were having issues that particular weekend, but I've not seen this in any of my webcasts, the latest being last Sunday's stake conference.

I guess people here are suggesting you give it another shot, before abandoning it for another service that we won't be able to assist you with.

If you are using the webcast communicator 'black box' then I might suggest having a fan to keep it cool, we have twice had issues part-way into our broadcast where we started to get some intermittent red lights on the Internet light on the communicator... With a quick fan placement the device cooled down quickly, and no issues reported, we have since ALWAYS kept a fan running on our devices.

JohnShaw wrote:If you are using the webcast communicator 'black box' then I might suggest having a fan to keep it cool, we have twice had issues part-way into our broadcast where we started to get some intermittent red lights on the Internet light on the communicator... With a quick fan placement the device cooled down quickly, and no issues reported, we have since ALWAYS kept a fan running on our devices.

At my last test, we did have a couple of issues at the receiving end, but it all came right back.

I think in the future that I will start using PVC solely, because when I used that for the leadership training. It worked great. It had great sound. I had to change a few things, but it worked great. So hopefully it will work long time. This is to prepare for multiple building broadcast.

So - I'll agree with the crowd here, you should probably stick with the provided solution and just troubleshoot what seems to be going wrong.

If you really are serious about trying an alternative, you should probably try the Church's personal video conferencing software (PVC). I assume it runs on different infrastructure than the webcasting.

There are some excellent alternatives out there - all paid services, though. You could try out Ustream.tv - if you get a paid account you won't have ads. You will want to mark your broadcasts private, though, or even password protect them, as the streams there are searchable and open to everyone.

WebEx is also a rock solid alternative that has high quality, adaptive video and your audio can travel over VoIP or over the telephone network.

Depending on how many people you need to tune in, you could use the premium version of Skype, too.

A free alternative? Have you tried the Google Hangouts in Google Plus? Really cool stuff there, but not really high quality video - in my opinion.