Adrian Mendez
New Member
Hey everyone,
I'm starting this topic as it has come to my attention that voltage variation can become an issue in certain scenarios surrounding video streaming.
I do live music streamings on FB live for my office, it ranges from 1 person acoustic sets, to DJ sets, to full live acts, clearly in that order of difficulty. In my experience, the biggest problem I've faced is always issues with internet connectivity. After many sessions in my office studio, a pattern started to emerge in which the most ambitious and equipment heavy streams failed due to internet connection issues.
I was in the dark for a long time regarding what could go wrong, being that we have an incredible 150 Mb upload rate connection and that I always connect directly to the source via ethernet cable.
First I thought it could be the way we were passing the ethernet cable from the source from the basement of the office all the way to the studio on a fourth level, since we had to do a makeshift setting of the cable with duck tape, leaving it exposed on walls etc. regardless of the fact that it's pretty easy to damage an ethernet cable (mea culpa) - We've fixed the problem in a more professional manner with better instalation but that makeshift cable still hangs today and in general it still works! it just failed on certain ocassions with equipment heavy live streams.
Another scenario I've considered is just the ocasional drop or instability of the internet connection that comes from outside our office, which is out of my control, but either way this is something quite rare, we rarely have internet issues with this service.
We try to do in door studio all the time, but sometimes it is requested that we use the terrace on the same 4th floor. bringing the live streaming equipment outdoors with heavy music equipment is a hot maintenance issue. We've had some streams fail in this setting and all coincided with very hard sun weather which made me think that as all the equipment heats up, it affects the performance of both computers and the ethernet cable. However when we've brought 1 person acoustic sets to the terrace, there's been no issues with either the computer equipment or internet connections, making it harder to define if heat is a real issue.
Now this brings me to my more recent discovery regarding voltage variation. When it comes to live acts, the more stuff the musicians bring on their tech rider, the easier it is for me to have issues with the internet. the constant pattern has been that the most ambitious ones tend to go wrong. Yesterday I had to live stream a DJ competition from a shoe store. I had the guys at the store upgrade their internet to a 30 Mb upload rate, which is quite decent for streaming and had to pull an ethernet cable from the router near the cash register to a second floor, i m talking about 15 meter worth of cable.
For this I brought a closed circuit and streaming provider with more profesional equipment. They also installed some light panels. I failed to ask how powerful this lights were, but they were not LED lights, so I'm guessing they did suck up a fair amount of juice. Added to the video/streaming equipment we had the audio crew set 2 separate CDJ kits, each one with 2 CDJs and a mixer, plus monitor speakers, and neon instalations in the background and on the DJ booths. There was also another separate event going on in the back of the store, but I ignore what type of equipments they were using, I'm guessing they mustve had music (DJ set up) and lighting.
Previous to the stream I ran some brief tests to be sure we had audio/video and also test out live reactions that were requested by the client. At this point everything ran smoothly. By the time we had to start the stream everything also started going well. but the stream fell about 15 minutes in. The internet connection was lost which caused the facebook stream to end. We had to restart the stream and keep going. The same pattern repeated, everything goes well at the beginning for the first few minutes until there's a sudden drop in internet connectivity. We were able to finish the competition in about 4 tries. on the 4th try, we only switched the ethernet cable to another hub on the router and disconnected the credit card readers that were connected to it. I believe by this time the event going on simultaneously in the back of the store was finishing.
Doing a recap with the guys in charged of streaming the signal on what could have gone wrong with the internet connection they told me that they were not confident it was an issue with the internet connection. They noticed good behaviour in terms of speed, and the fact that there were no issues with the IPs switching. The only other thing they could figure is that the whole set up of this operation was using too much electricity, causing a voltage variation that caused the internet router to lose power and hence lose the internet connection. To prevent this they recomend pulling juice from a separate and dedicated power source. I have yet to try out this scenario but let me know what you think and if you have any recomendations in this regard.
Cheers!
I'm starting this topic as it has come to my attention that voltage variation can become an issue in certain scenarios surrounding video streaming.
I do live music streamings on FB live for my office, it ranges from 1 person acoustic sets, to DJ sets, to full live acts, clearly in that order of difficulty. In my experience, the biggest problem I've faced is always issues with internet connectivity. After many sessions in my office studio, a pattern started to emerge in which the most ambitious and equipment heavy streams failed due to internet connection issues.
I was in the dark for a long time regarding what could go wrong, being that we have an incredible 150 Mb upload rate connection and that I always connect directly to the source via ethernet cable.
First I thought it could be the way we were passing the ethernet cable from the source from the basement of the office all the way to the studio on a fourth level, since we had to do a makeshift setting of the cable with duck tape, leaving it exposed on walls etc. regardless of the fact that it's pretty easy to damage an ethernet cable (mea culpa) - We've fixed the problem in a more professional manner with better instalation but that makeshift cable still hangs today and in general it still works! it just failed on certain ocassions with equipment heavy live streams.
Another scenario I've considered is just the ocasional drop or instability of the internet connection that comes from outside our office, which is out of my control, but either way this is something quite rare, we rarely have internet issues with this service.
We try to do in door studio all the time, but sometimes it is requested that we use the terrace on the same 4th floor. bringing the live streaming equipment outdoors with heavy music equipment is a hot maintenance issue. We've had some streams fail in this setting and all coincided with very hard sun weather which made me think that as all the equipment heats up, it affects the performance of both computers and the ethernet cable. However when we've brought 1 person acoustic sets to the terrace, there's been no issues with either the computer equipment or internet connections, making it harder to define if heat is a real issue.
Now this brings me to my more recent discovery regarding voltage variation. When it comes to live acts, the more stuff the musicians bring on their tech rider, the easier it is for me to have issues with the internet. the constant pattern has been that the most ambitious ones tend to go wrong. Yesterday I had to live stream a DJ competition from a shoe store. I had the guys at the store upgrade their internet to a 30 Mb upload rate, which is quite decent for streaming and had to pull an ethernet cable from the router near the cash register to a second floor, i m talking about 15 meter worth of cable.
For this I brought a closed circuit and streaming provider with more profesional equipment. They also installed some light panels. I failed to ask how powerful this lights were, but they were not LED lights, so I'm guessing they did suck up a fair amount of juice. Added to the video/streaming equipment we had the audio crew set 2 separate CDJ kits, each one with 2 CDJs and a mixer, plus monitor speakers, and neon instalations in the background and on the DJ booths. There was also another separate event going on in the back of the store, but I ignore what type of equipments they were using, I'm guessing they mustve had music (DJ set up) and lighting.
Previous to the stream I ran some brief tests to be sure we had audio/video and also test out live reactions that were requested by the client. At this point everything ran smoothly. By the time we had to start the stream everything also started going well. but the stream fell about 15 minutes in. The internet connection was lost which caused the facebook stream to end. We had to restart the stream and keep going. The same pattern repeated, everything goes well at the beginning for the first few minutes until there's a sudden drop in internet connectivity. We were able to finish the competition in about 4 tries. on the 4th try, we only switched the ethernet cable to another hub on the router and disconnected the credit card readers that were connected to it. I believe by this time the event going on simultaneously in the back of the store was finishing.
Doing a recap with the guys in charged of streaming the signal on what could have gone wrong with the internet connection they told me that they were not confident it was an issue with the internet connection. They noticed good behaviour in terms of speed, and the fact that there were no issues with the IPs switching. The only other thing they could figure is that the whole set up of this operation was using too much electricity, causing a voltage variation that caused the internet router to lose power and hence lose the internet connection. To prevent this they recomend pulling juice from a separate and dedicated power source. I have yet to try out this scenario but let me know what you think and if you have any recomendations in this regard.
Cheers!