Hi, this is not really a VMix question specifically but there is a lot of expertise here and others may have done this.

We use VMix to livestream our church services from our rented meeting venue in a school (morning and evening on Sundays). The morning service goes to a single stream but the evening service is a combination of several churches meeting together so that is streamed to 3 different channels (for each church).

For various reasons we have had unreliability in the streaming PC which causes the stream to stop being sent (I won't bore you with the details but things like mains power failing, bluescreen on the PC, random disconnect from school wifi).

Youtube allows the incoming data to drop for about 60 seconds before they end the stream and you have to start a new event, which is quite time consuming (especially for the triple stream) and viewers have to go find the new event. While we chase down all the gremlins I would like to setup a fallback solution which continues to send data to Youtube - maybe just a static caption - to keep the stream events active and viewers online while we get the main stream going again.

Question is, is there an automatic way to do this by sending a backup stream from another laptop (could be just a static caption). If you send a backup stream to youtube's backup ingest there doesn't seem to be a way to control which one gets used, and we'd need the main stream to be sent by default. We could just have a laptop running VMix standing ready, which we manually click "Stream" on, if the main PC falls over for some reason, it's a bit hacky but this is my current idea to try.

Thanks for any good ideas...

If you send both at the same time, you can't control which one youtube uses (as far as I can work out). So if one is a backup graphic, that can get broadcast even if the main stream is still healthy.

When I tested, it seems unpredictable. I don't want it swapping to the backup graphic mid stream when the main stream is OK. Does the stream you started first always stay active in your experience (unless it fails)?

Hi,

a bit of background: Ususally you stream on RTMP from vMix/OBS/your encoder to the YouTube ingest server. This connection goes over TCP. If you try to set up a second connection to the same ingest point while the first on eis running, this will not work. I did not test this, but results can go from "nothing happens" to "clobbering signals over" depending on the infrastructure at the YT end.

If your source does not send enough RTMP data in time, the YT ingest point recognizes this and sends the warning. Than the timeout starts to send more video within 60 seconds. If your TCP connection is still there, but no video in it (bandwith issues, packet drops, LTE reconfiguration delays etc.), you can not send the standby signal from another source. If the TCP connection form the encoder is destroyed, you *can* than send from another source.

So you need to handle these switching on the connection level carefully and manually.

Another solution is the IRL OBS switcher (https://github.com/bietiekay/irl-obs-switcher). This software takes a stream in, relays it to a destination and monitors the stream. Combined with OBS it can switch scenes when the ingest stream has problems. I did not test it personally; a colleguea mentioned it to me. As far as I understand, you need OBS to receive your stream and send it to YT. If the stream fails, the software will detect this and switch OBS to your "Emergency scene".

For this you will need a OBS instance running somewhere in the "safe Internet" within a datacenter or a good uplink connectivity.

Good luck and let us know how you solved the problem.

Christian