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meijin  
#1 Posted : Friday, July 25, 2014 10:20:33 AM(UTC)
meijin

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Location: Jacksonville, FL

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Hello everyone! I have been searching for a good online streaming package for a while now and believe I have setteled on vMix. But I do need some help and suggestions to get things finalized. I am sorry if this is a rather long message, but I want to give as much detail as possible.

In my situation, the primary use for vMix is going to be an online sales show in a rare but very profitable niche. I have a partner who is the only one who will be online. He is in another city about 6 hours away. I am NOT on the show or stream at all. All I am doing is working as the producer and streaming the show. So, in vMix, I need to bring in my partner's audio and video as well as be able to do some lower thirds and HD images of the products being offerd. The lower thirds and the images I have gotten figured out pretty quickly. It is getting his audio and video in that is presenting the challenges. Since I have used the remote desktop tool successfully, I am assuming I could have him Skype in and then get that into vMix. I should also add that I plan on recording the shows to local HDD as well as streaming.

Here is my computer configuration:

Asus G74S desktop replacement
Core i7 2670 @ 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3 GHz
12GB RAM
Nvidia Gforce 560M graphics card with 3GB of [dedicated] memory
Windows Home Premium (64 bit) with SP1
Logitech C920 cam (same model being used remotely)
18.3" screen on the Asus with 2 24" HD monitors attached
Multiple terabytes of HDD space (internal and external drives)

My internet connect is an Xtreme 100 package from Comcast. With a wired connection I can maintain about 120 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up.

I have 3 main questions that I was wondering about:

#1. What is the best way to get the remote talent in the stream (audio and video)? Remember, I will NOT be in the stream, just him. Also, I don't need to have him see or hear anything. I'll be using a cell phone as a sort of IFB to communicate with him. He is a professional, so he is use to doing shows live and having a producer in his ear. I don't have the time or equipment to route the Skype from another computer into a mixer and then into the vMix computer. Can I just run Skype on one of the 24" screens and use the screen capture to get it into vMix? If so, how about the audio? How do I get that in? If not Skype, is there a better service to use? Please keep in mind that I am a total newbie here.

#2. In the past, we have used Google Hangouts to do 3 shows. Didn't love it, but it worked. Can Hangouts be configured with vMix? I have seen YouTube live events mentioned, but have never used that. I have a free Justin.tv account, but for the life of me cannot get the vMix stream to show up there. Suggestions on this are most welcome.

#3. Lastly I am wondering about what format to stream and record? 720? 1080? Obviously, since this is sales, a good visual quality is desired. I can get away with a crappier view of the talent, but need good looking shots of the images I am showing of the items. And I have high quality HD images to show. I am also concerned about local file size restrictions. Any thoughts here would be most welcome as well.

That's it for me. My thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out. I look forward to really getting into vMix and being a regular contributor here!

Michael
fordry  
#2 Posted : Friday, July 25, 2014 9:53:36 PM(UTC)
fordry

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1) what you suggest would work. I am unsure of the quality of desktop capture but if you wanted the best quality it might work better to get an hdmi capture card and run your screen that skype is going to into your capture card and have vmix pull that. Would get the full quality and framerate for sure that way. For audio, vmix can capture system audio, just add an input>audio>system audio (or whichever audio device you want to use). Then just click the audio button on that input on the main screen. Can set audio delay in external output settings page.

An alternative which would probably be better than any of the webcam services would be for you to run your own rtmp streaming server that he could connect to with Flash Media Live Encoder. It would give you guys complete control over how good his stream quality will be with the limitation being his upload speeds. Mistserver is a great, free rtmp server that is relatively easy to setup. You need to know how to configure ports on your router and his router and be familiar with working with network addresses with port numbers in order to be capable of getting it working. Their site has all the documentation you should need to get it operational. Once you have it setup it will be easy to give your presenter the info he needs to put into FMLE (or just remote in and do it yourself and save the settings). You can then pull the RTMP stream from mistserver to vmix. It will be capable of looking better than Skype. FMLE can pull in a webcam and audio directly.

2) Youtube live looks pretty good to me. No ads, server side transcoding (meaning for multibitrate you don't have seen all the bitrates yourself, just send Youtube the highest quality setting and it fills in the lower tiers), and its free.

3) If you have the bandwidth and the horsepower to handle it, you may as well do 1080. I don't know what you mean by local filesize restrictions but if you are concerned about file sizes, just shrink them down some. If they are ultra high quality, large size files, you may as well batch convert them to smaller 1080ish jpegs. If you need a good program for doing that, Irfanview is a really good tool for batch image conversions
richardgatarski  
#3 Posted : Tuesday, July 29, 2014 12:08:29 PM(UTC)
richardgatarski

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Location: Stockholm

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Michael,
In addition to fordry's excellent answer check out this thread too http://forums.vmix.com.a....aspx?g=posts&t=2251 (where I also suggest using Teradek cubes to get in your remote talent).

Note that Youtube will shut you down (live) if the show contains (copyrighted) music. And they have strict rules concerning the types of commercial use of YouTube. I am not sure, but your show might not be allowed.
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