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richardgatarski  
#1 Posted : Sunday, June 15, 2014 9:14:33 AM(UTC)
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At least two things motivate a native support for AAC audio in streams generated by vMix. In no particular order:

- YouTube requires AAC
- MP3 is not, if at all, supported on iOS and Android platforms (altough some CDN's offer live transcoding to AAC).

Of course one can buy the AAC encoder plugin for FMLE from Mainconcept for around AUD 200.
Martin has earlier pointed out that the licensing cost for integrating that plugin into vMix is the same.

Enter Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), which many vMix users use to stream (using vMix External as an input to OBS). OBS defaults to AAC, but can stream with MP3 as well.

In the related topic "Nvidia CUDA acceleration" daniel154 suggests that OBS can be a solution for that (although I could not see any reduction in CPU use from my quick test, maybe because of an underpowered GTX765M loaded down by 2x720 @50p).

I'm about to invest in a number of more vMix licenses, and adding the Mainconcept plugin to all of them does not feel so great ;) Leaning towards streaming via OBS, but that's an extra step...

So, how important is AAC to us?
Would it be possible to replace/supplement FMLE with OBS?

Thanks!
admin  
#2 Posted : Sunday, June 15, 2014 9:52:26 AM(UTC)
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Hi Richard,

YouTube Live should work fine with MP3 when streaming (or at least it did as recently as two days ago!).

OBS would need to implement extensive command line functionality in order for vMix to integrate with it as it
does with FMLE. The reason for this is licensing related, only command line integration is possible with open source software.

FFMPEG is a potential alternative as it has command line support built in.
The problem is the general unreliability / sync problems i've seen with many of these open source solutions.
I'm keeping an eye on them though, to see if things improve.

As for CUDA acceleration, I would warn against using that with vMix as it can hog the GPU.
Instead look for solutions that use dedicated encoding hardware that is usually available separately from the GPU chip.
(NVEnc on Quadro hardware as an example)

Regards,

Martin
vMix
richardgatarski  
#3 Posted : Sunday, June 15, 2014 5:23:30 PM(UTC)
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Yo! Martin,
Thanks for a superfast response (as usual ;)

I totally get your points, and am happy to recognize that you are keeping an eye on the field of FMLE alternatives.

We probably set something wrong when we tried mp3 with YouTube (sounded terrible). Will check again, but still need aac for our favvo CDN (not YouTube).

Stuff like CUDA, NVEnc, Quadro (and Keplar) are outside my narrow mind, but I think I understand what you mean.

And, the bottom line is that vMix provide so much value for the money that I can overcome my disgust for how much Mainconcept charge for their plugin.
richardgatarski  
#4 Posted : Wednesday, August 6, 2014 8:47:17 AM(UTC)
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True, mp3 works now in YouTube. Seems like they have changed their recommended live encoder settings. Although in practice it's somewhat confusing. As I write this, the recommencation is:

Quote:
Protocol: RTMP Flash Streaming
Video codec: H.264, Main 4.1
Frame rate: up to 60 fps
Keyframe frequency: 2 seconds
Audio codec: AAC-LC (or MP3)
Audio sample rate: 44.1 KHz
Audio bitrate: 128 Kbps stereo

MP3 works fine, and is live transcoded in such a way that the audio stream can be heard on iOS and Android.

Regarding frame rate it is possible to set vMix's streamer rate to 50 fps (if one manually enters that, there is no drop down selection for 50 fps). When the stream is started YouTube initially report it as "Good" in the Live control Room. But after a while (a few seconds/minutes) it changes to "Bad" and says frame rate should be changed to 30 fps. I believe this is a YouTube bug. At least the stream comes out fine in the live player.

(When I tested this today I had problems seeng the Preview and Public players in YouTube's Live control room. But I think this is another bug of theirs).
wwdv  
#5 Posted : Tuesday, December 2, 2014 1:13:11 PM(UTC)
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Was looking for OBS experiences and found only this topic.

I tried OBS, but the cpu recources are much higher than FMLE and the audio-video sync is not stable.
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