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Thoughts after first meetinghouse communicator stream

Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2012 5:28 am
by aclawson
We completed our first 2.5 hour stream last night. All in all the experience was a net success - here are my thoughts on the run.

The box works well and is simple to configure. It got slightly on the warm side and could have used an internal fan.

The documentation indicates that there is a composite video in port and you can see where one was designed into the chassis but the only audio in port is a 3.5mm (1/8). The composite audio in is far more useful than the 3.5mm and should not have been cut from the design.

Audio quality was acceptable overall, but the singing/piano playing was very poor. This has to do with the building sound system and has nothing to do with the box.

Hooking up the box to the audio and video feeds involved multiple steps:

1. The coax out line from the building's A/V distribution box was plugged into an old VCR.

2. The VCR was tuned to channel 6

3. A composite cable was run from the video OUT into the composite video IN on the box.

4. A 3.5mm M/M line was run from the headphone out of the A/V monitoring TV to the box.

I notice that there are USB ports on the back. Has anybody tried a USB tuner to bring the signal directly into the communicator?

Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 7:26 am
by sammythesm
aclawson wrote: Audio quality was acceptable overall, but the singing/piano playing was very poor. This has to do with the building sound system and has nothing to do with the box.

Yes, I'd say that most of us have found that extra microphones, mixed through a mixer and then fed to the communicator/webcast software, is the best way to get great audio for your webcast. Relying 100% on the building sound system just doesn't seem to cut it.