Let me preface this by saying I love vMix. And, I was really excited about an alternative to the limitations of Zoom and Skype. Unfortunately I learned that I should have used one of the latter services and saved myself a giant headache, to say nothing of the loss of a new, high profile client.

You see, this evening (the date of this post), I was to set up and run what amounted to a virtual conference call, with six guests, which we planned to live stream to their FB page. I spent much time crafting framed backdrops to match their brand and carefully cropped each of the vMixCall inputs to correspond with each guest and their overlay. I even had the organizer and myself as guests set up so that we could control the action yet our audio/video would not see the recording or live feed (think: IFB).

We tested this yesterday with minor but mixed results; We only had four bodies to sub in and, for the most part, they could connect, but occasionally they could not, that is, to the same number (password) they just connected to. I, on the other hand, could connect, via a separate PC, to any of the numbers each time I tried so I stupidly wrote that off as an anomaly.

Day of show however, I found out just how wrong we were in taking that project on. Of all eight participants, only four were finally able to connect. Myself, the organizer, her boss, and one other individual. The others, though I could often see that they were connected, I would would never receive audio or video in their input. Sometimes disconnecting and reconnecting / changing browsers / etc. would bring guests up, but not with anything that I would call consistency. Plus, there was no shortage of freezes, audio cutouts and ultimately, drop offs- to say nothing of the variables that one would expect from remote guests (poor connections, poor cameras/mics, not using headphones, not having their video/mics turned on, etc).

After more than an hour I stopped the presses and switched to Zoom. But, then, as you can imagine, all of my hard work was for naught. My templates were toast and my overlays were useless and the limitations of Zoom became quite apparent yet again (Interface changes as guests join/drop, stupid yellow box for active speaker etc.) - But, I had to go live. Unfortunately, my troubles didn't end there.

Even as an admin of their FB page, for the first time I faced a sudden inability to stream as an admin of their page (error 200?). In fact, I could not even change the FB log-in in the vMix Stream dialog box in my vain attempt to use one of their admin log-ins to re-attempt a stream (still scratching my head on that one).

So, after all of that, the ultimate disaster night was complete. I ended up calling it off and apologizing for everyone's wasted time.

I could be wrong, and probably put too much pressure and faith in the new add-on, but I can't help but think Call is not ready for prime-time.

I was willing to work around the inability to have a full screen guest image in a Call input (what's that about?) and, was willing to figure out a way to get Call guests to participate in the IFB out of my mixer, but inconsistency of connection (sans standard internet/guest issues) I cannot live with.

Looks like I'm stuck with the fall-backs (Zooms/Skypes) for now- unless any of you have a viable alternative to what I have described, or, can point out any wrong doing in my implementation of Call. Otherwise, sorry for the wall of text and thanks for listening to my rant.

Current issue questions:

1) Why is the connectivity to a Call number hit-or-miss? (Is it likely vMix? vimixcall.com? Or am I alone here?)
2) Did I perhaps miss a list of preferred browsers/settings to use for vMix Call?
3) Why is there a bounding box around the video of a Call Guest input?
4) Why are there buttons to Host/Join when setting up a call input, when simply ignoring that choice creates a valid number (PW) for the call input?
5) Why does choosing "Host a Call" change the number?
6) Have I missed a easy way to re-instate the original number for a specific input?
7) Why doesn't the input name change back to the number when a caller drops off? (it should imo)
8) Are there plans to add a method of helping individual guests to connect to Call? (pre-compiled email invite similar to Zoom?)

@ DWAM

While I agree with everything you say, in all fairness to edgemedia, there has been a lot of hype surrounding vMixCall as the "trouble free" solution as a replacement for Skype and/or Zoom integration of calls into a live streaming production and perhaps a misperception that it is not susceptible to external factors that can affect it's performance or that it should be thoroughly TESTED before jumping in with both feet...

EDIT: Also note that the WOLS gang (link above to Streaming Idiots Special) use a combination of Zoom, vMixCall and "TeamSpeak" in their production (perhaps Giles can pipe in on the exact workflow, which is obviously not problem free). To the best of my knowledge, Jim Jacobs was on a vMixCall to Jon, which IMHO, was the most problematic connection of all the "guests". Personally, I think it's important to document the issues that users are having with vMixCall, whether vMix related or not, in order to help make it an even better solution as everyone moves forward.
Just my thoughts.

Ice

Unless you give technical information, there is no way to help. There are many possible reasons:
- bandwidth
- corporate firewall
- OS
- device
- browser
- etc...
vMixCall doesn't work for anyone in any technical context, that's a fact!

It's just the way it works

this is certainly due to your input settings > source aspect ratio
http://www.vmix.com/help...nputSettingsGeneral.html

I'm not exactly sure what you call IFB (sorry I'm French) but I think it means to be able to talk to guests or crew without being recorded/streamed in the production. As the case may be, as a matter of fact, I gave a solution to do this lately right here in this forum (not exactly your use case but quite):
https://forums.vmix.com/...ts&m=39762#post39762
There are many other topics addressing this issue too

As of Zoom/FB points, I prefer not to reply

So again, very sorry for you. Don't want to sound sarcastic or offensive (which I'm told sometimes) but mastering vMix and mastering live production requires a lot of work and knowledge and it's not as easy as it may give the impression. And as @Ice said, I'm not sure the hype about vMixCall (and the way it is perceived) is a good thing because the more features vMix has, the more complex it goes, especially when dealing with connections over the internet.

My 2 cts. Best regards
Guillaume

edgemedia,

Sorry you didn't have a good first experience with vMix Call.
Based on your report, i would say some of the issues experienced are due to network congestion.

In the Zoom case, it combines multiple feeds at the server side into a single video the is then streamed to your application.
This means it uses a lot less bandwidth, but is also not as flexible as the quality of each callers video window is quite low on its own
unless you select it fullscreen in which case you can't see the other callers.

vMix Call by comparison is all point to point, you are establishing separate high quality calls between all your guests, so if a high bandwidth
connection is not used, then adding more than one guest at a time is going to cause problems, which I suspect was the case here.

The other questions raised are mostly answered by our tutorial video and documentation which can be found below:

http://www.vmix.com/help19/VideoCall.html


If you would like us to investigate further why a caller was unable to connect, drop us an email with the call password used
and we will be able to lookup the logs and see what happened (though I suspect its a network issue as a result of multiple streams vs only one with zoom).

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Martin
vMix

@edgemedia, I'm new to vMix Call. Can you please explain what "network congestion" means in this case? Was the issue at your end because you didn't have enough upload and/or download bandwidth?

Does the amount of upload/download bandwidth increase for all vMix Call participants based on the number of participants, or does the increase in bandwidth only apply to the host?

Have you had experiences with vMix Call since and can you share how they went?

I've been using Wirecast with Zoom but am interested in vMix Call.

Thanks.