Hi,
First a disclaimer - I've never dealt with live streaming before, but this new world of social distancing has made it necessary look into it. In other words, apologies in advance to not necessarily understanding most basic aspects and terms discussed.
My wife is a group fitness instructor, and since the gyms are closed, we are trying to do live streams from her dance studio in our basement for her clients. We are using a Behringer XENYX Q802USB mixer, into which we are feeding her workout music from her ipod, and her instructions via an inexpensive wireless mic (receiver plugged into the mixer). The mixer connects to the USB-C port of her Surface Book 2 via a USB hub, from which an HDMI signal is also pulled to a nearby monitor. The computer is connected to a dedicated internet connection no-one else is using. Either via ethernet cable or wifi, we're getting similar speed readings (300Mbps down/30Mbps up), which I think should well be fast enough. So nothing fancy by any means, but seems to work fine for what it is for. In theory.
Everyday before doing the public stream (or the night before), she has done a private Facebook Live stream which I'm watching in real time on the internet with a phone upstairs (not connected to the streaming network), and by and large the quality is good. An occasional audio dropout here and there, but nothing that seems abnormal for a streamed signal - we could happily live with that quality. We did one of these tests an hour before going public today, and it was ok.
However, in the public broadcast we are running into the same problem daily - the stream starts well, looks and sounds from good to great, with a clean audio mix. Everyone is happy with clients posting appreciative comments about the quality. But somewhere around the 5-7 minute mark the audio starts dropping out increasingly to a point where the stream becomes unlistenable, and her viewer numbers understandably drop enormously - the most dedicated ones stay, but turn the audio off :( This has happened three days in a row now, and with no changes will no doubt happen tomorrow as well, so we need find some kind of solution.
The thing I don't understand is the interruptions seem only be affecting the audio, not the video - I would expect the video to stutter as well. The video quality may fluctuate a little bit, I imagine that's a given with streaming, but it is clean enough and continuous. So whatever occurs around the 5-minute mark (and lasts through the remainder of the 45-min class) seems to only affect the audio. And why would the first five minutes be clean? If there was a systematic problem, wouldn't that manifest itself more or less from the start? This is like the signal being throttled after a while, but affecting only the audio stream.
I'm getting advice and recommendations from well-meaning people, who suggest to ditch the mic and the mixer and just use the inbuilt laptop mic to record the room. First, that doesn't sound very good, and I find it hard to believe that the streaming platform would be that selective about the contents of the audio - isn't it just data, regardless of how well it is captured? I don't believe our levels are excessively loud either, though I would think that would manifest itself as clipping/overdriven audio rather than dropouts.
Any troubleshooting tips you might be able to offer me would be appreciated. I would pay someone to come fix it, but I don't think many technicians are inclined to do home visits. I know Cox Communications (our provider) won't until further notice. So I'm afraid I'm left to my own newbie devices, which is probably not a recipe for success.
Here's today's class - I apologize for the music-heavy mix, my last-minute adjustment that went wrong. You'll note the dropouts starting around the 7-minute mark, and quickly deteriorating from there.
https://www.facebook.com.../videos/225808501992284/Thank you for any help you might be able to provide!
Kind regards,
Janne
