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socialnetworker  
#1 Posted : Wednesday, January 23, 2019 4:35:42 AM(UTC)
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New here, thank you for there being such a place.
Looking for advice about how to stream live from my desktop to Roku (and Fire TV, but less a priority right now)…
and have Two Questions...
I have a channel set up already using the Easy Publishing system for ROKU.

Will be conducting online video chat interviews, and want to broadcast these every 30 or 60 minutes for about 10 minutes each, over perhaps an 8 hour period of time. If the costs turn out to be ridiculously expensive, then I will have to settle for 30 mins once per day.

I would like to do my video interviews using appear.in - which allows up to 12 people to be in a room at the same time, and it allows presenters to ScreenShare, which is important for my purposes.

(I would settle for Skype or some other Video chat solution if there is no way to use Appear.in. I dislike Skype, and it is too much trouble to get Guests to install it if they do not already use it).

I could also use a product called WebinarJam, which allows 4 Presenters simultaneously on screen...or anything else somebody thinks would work better.

So, I need to find a way to do broadcast what is on my screen - with the audio from the video chat- live.

Question 1: Can I use V-mix to accomplish the goal of capturing my Video Chat AND the computer Audio, whether it is for broadcasting to Facebook Live or any other Live Streaming platform?

Question 2: I have seen posts about the topic of streaming to ROKU in this forum from several years ago, but the solutions discussed seemed either unwieldly or a bit over my head.

Are there easier less expensive solutions available in 2019?

A service like DaCast seems like it would put most of the pieces together for me, but it seems to be relatively expensive - I'm a retired pensioner.
I obtained information from this DIY guide for live streaming from InstantTvChannel.com for a less expensive solution, but it still seems to have a lot of moving parts and seems likely to turn out expensive given it relies upon AWS, which I am told can yield huge bills.

Could somebody please advise me whether there are better solutions compared to what they suggested, which I have copied below, Thanks:

Cost for Live Streaming using Wowza and Amazon EC2:

Instant TV Channel account: Free
Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder: Free
(Wirecast can be used instead of Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder, approximate cost is $500.)
MainConcept AAC Encoder Plug-in: $180
(One-time purchase, Windows only, not needed for Mac.)
Wowza: $15.00 per month plus usage charges for Wowza Streaming Cloud or $65.00 per month for Wowza Streaming Engine.
Wowza offers a 30-day free trial for Wowza Streaming Cloud and a 180-day free trial for the Wowza Streaming Engine.
Amazon AWS EC2: Cost is built into Wowza Streaming Cloud usage charges.
For Wowza Streaming Engine there is a separate AWS charge that varies depending on the instance (server) size selected.
For testing, we will use an AWS EC2 t1.small instance which is the smallest server size that is compatible with Wowza.
Cost for an AWS EC2 t1.small instance is $0.044/hour.
Amazon AWS S3: Cost is built into Wowza Streaming Cloud usage charges.
For Wowza Streaming Engine the S3 cost is approximately $0.09 per GB.
One hour of HD 720p video streamed to one player will use approximately 1 GB of S3 bandwith.
Testing a single Roku player with a Wowza free trial, an EC2 t1.small instance, and a 720p stream will typically cost about 15 cents per hour, not including any bandwidth charges from your ISP.

I would be willing to reimburse somebody for their time and effort in helping me to get something that works inexpensively set up.
kjones9999  
#2 Posted : Wednesday, January 23, 2019 12:48:01 PM(UTC)
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There are free options for the wowza/Dacast part, but you are not getting around the bandwidth cost.

Question -- how often will you broadcast and what is your expected viewership?

My first reaction would be to use Mistserver and AWS or digital Ocean, but the cost really depends on the badnwidth out you anticipate....

socialnetworker  
#3 Posted : Wednesday, January 23, 2019 5:15:57 PM(UTC)
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Thank you for your reply kjones9999.

I have used this site's calculator, but I do not know if it's accurate,
or if it applies only to THEIR services: scaleengine.com
Usage calculator

If I budget for 100 viewers of 60 minutes daily, it seems to work out
to be between 3 and 4 dollars a day.

I am afraid of using AWS, I have heard that the costs can escalate really quickly,
and one can get huge bills all of a sudden.

I had heard that wasabi.com is much cheaper than AWS, and one video marketer who streams a lot of videos on demand
stated he used them and saved a lot of money.

Somebody from instanttvchannel.com told me this:
"I'm not sure if Wasabi.com can be used with a Roku channel. They make no mention of streaming. They do say this "If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we reserve the right to limit your egress traffic and/or ask you to switch to our Legacy pricing plan. Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times." which seems to indicate that if it does work for streaming, then you will be billed at 4c per GB streamed. 4c/GB is higher than many other companies. "

But, at this point, I have no information from anybody who actually does live streaming.

I gather from some of your other posts that you livestream athletic events for a school,
and that you have quite a bit of experience with using Vmix, so I am very grateful for your input.

I have looked at Mistserver, I assume you are suggesting I use the $9 month option.
mavik  
#4 Posted : Thursday, January 24, 2019 10:38:02 PM(UTC)
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Please take a look at boxcast.com
Sounds to me that it could be the perfect fit for you.
socialnetworker  
#5 Posted : Friday, January 25, 2019 7:03:43 AM(UTC)
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Really? Who can afford to spend over $1000 just to get started at the bottom level?
socialnetworker  
#6 Posted : Tuesday, January 29, 2019 5:08:43 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: kjones9999 Go to Quoted Post
There are free options for the wowza/Dacast part, but you are not getting around the bandwidth cost.

Question -- how often will you broadcast and what is your expected viewership?

My first reaction would be to use Mistserver and AWS or digital Ocean, but the cost really depends on the badnwidth out you anticipate....


kjones9999 : could you please help me by telling me examples of what YOUR costs have been like for your use case?

I would also appreciate it if you can tell me how the flow works if I use Mistserver and AWS?
Do I need any special scripts to connect AWS and mistserver and then to ROKU?

kjones9999  
#7 Posted : Thursday, January 31, 2019 11:46:40 AM(UTC)
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I ran the numbers. IF you leave the server on all day every day I estimate your costs for AWS to be 300-400 dollars a month. Now if you are only doing 1 hr a day it would be much, much less.

Mistserver is a free version of wowza, you dont need to pay to use open source. Just spinup a linux instance, login download mistserver and you are set.

More details on what you are trying to do would be helpful. Long story short, you need to be able to serve an HLS stream for Roku.

socialnetworker  
#8 Posted : Tuesday, February 12, 2019 3:42:11 PM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: kjones9999 Go to Quoted Post
I ran the numbers. IF you leave the server on all day every day I estimate your costs for AWS to be 300-400 dollars a month. Now if you are only doing 1 hr a day it would be much, much less.

Mistserver is a free version of wowza, you dont need to pay to use open source. Just spinup a linux instance, login download mistserver and you are set.

More details on what you are trying to do would be helpful. Long story short, you need to be able to serve an HLS stream for Roku.



I simply want to stream the video and audio from my desktop to roku and Fire TV, eventually.
I will be interviewing people in a video chat room, and want to broadcast that for perhaps an hour a day.


I managed to get a static channel set up on ROKU set up, and I have ONE video on there.
I will be using vimeo as the source of my archived videos,
but that does not help me for live streaming an event.

I have no idea how to set up the live stream.

You make it sound simple for a 68 year old retired guy who was hospitalized during the Polar Vortex because he was too stupid to come in from shoveling snow to simply "spin up a Linux instance."

I'm not lazy, and not a quitter, but I have no idea how mistserver and the audio and video from the video chat on my desktop will be coordinated.

As usual, this stuff makes perfect sense to people who have already done it, but it makes no sense to me.
kjones9999  
#9 Posted : Friday, February 15, 2019 11:36:47 AM(UTC)
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Sorry--

Lets do this-

How many viewers do you think you will have for the one hour?

Are you using Vimeo to stream or you do you need a stream provider as well?
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