Running worship services simultaneously on YouTube and Zoom

Hi Folks
My church is intending to stream live worship services from a town centre church on both YouTube and Zoom. We've done one or two investigative services recently over our existing broadband, 69Mbps down, 17 Mbps up. This is barely adequate we've found. My question is: should we go to two lines or change our contract to something better. It seems that G.Fast is available and so are some very fast (and expensive) fibre connections (not BT FTTP). We need an upload circuit with bare minimum speed of 30Mbps, so what suggestions for the most reliable and cost effective solution? The town is Maidenhead.

What resolution and bitrate are you streaming at?

Zoom is usually fine with just 2 Mbps upload and YouTube should be HD with around a 3 Mbps upload.

A key requirement if dong lots of upload activity is to not have lots of download going on.

As MrSaffron says you've got plenty of bandwidth, check if you're hitting limits elsewhere. However a quick google looks to suggest you can publish directly to YouTube from Zoom, which would save bandwidth.

Why do you need both?

Just use Zoom and there will be no issues. Every user should be able to join using phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ...


My connection is similar to yours and we do regular training sessions. Recently, whilst hosting, one participant had to use their phone for the camera and laptop for the screen so effectively one host and two participants on the connection. There were absolutely no issues - apart from audio feedback which was easily sorted with plenty of bandwidth for other uses.

In reply to a post by wizzpilot:

Hi Folks
My church is intending to stream live worship services from a town centre church on both YouTube and Zoom. We've done one or two investigative services recently over our existing broadband, 69Mbps down, 17 Mbps up. This is barely adequate we've found. My question is: should we go to two lines or change our contract to something better. It seems that G.Fast is available and so are some very fast (and expensive) fibre connections (not BT FTTP). We need an upload circuit with bare minimum speed of 30Mbps, so what suggestions for the most reliable and cost effective solution? The town is Maidenhead.

As others have said the upload you have should be plenty even for two 1080p streams.
However if you have a Zoom premium account you can simplify things by streaming your Zoom meeting directly to YouTube from Zoom.
So you would only be sending one stream over your connection then the Zoom server forwards it on to YouTube.
If you need any help let me know.

My clear understanding is that YouTube runs in HD at at least 9Mbps upload and Zoom takes almost the same again as in our case it carries music and video. To avoid contention issues we are aiming at a minimum UPLOAD speed of 30Mbps. On one of our trial services our existing 17Mbps connection almost maxed out and Youtube Studio was flagging up warning notices. Not quite sure where your figures came from.
Our Zoom services this year have had up to 180 members logged in so it's a reasonably substantial congregation.

Edited by deleted (Mon 16-Nov-20 11:42:56)

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-...

In reply to a post by wizzpilot:

My clear understanding is that YouTube runs in HD at at least 9Mbps upload and Zoom takes almost the same again as in our case it carries music and video. To avoid contention issues we are aiming at a minimum UPLOAD speed of 30Mbps. On one of our trial services our existing 17Mbps connection almost maxed out and Youtube Studio was flagging up warning notices. Not quite sure where your figures came from.
Our Zoom services this year have had up to 180 members logged in so it's a reasonably substantial congregation.

Hi Wizz,

Did you see my reply about only needing to send one stream?

In reply to a post by wizzpilot:

My clear understanding is that YouTube runs in HD at at least 9Mbps upload and Zoom takes almost the same again as in our case it carries music and video.

Nobody's mentioned video frame rate...

As a non-expert, it sounds to me as though you're uploading in broadcast quality (probably 50fps) and everyone else is referring to around 10fps which is usually enough for conference or group-type activity.

Edited by billford (Mon 16-Nov-20 12:17:24)

Last time I used the Pro version of Zoom you couldn't change video rates and I never saw more than 2Mb/s upstream - often it would be 1Mb/s or lower.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Last time I used the Pro version of Zoom you couldn't change video rates and I never saw more than 2Mb/s upstream - often it would be 1Mb/s or lower.

Like I said, I'm not an expert... just commenting on what the bitrates suggest.

Yes, was just saying the position in Zoom. Don't know what options there are with youtube streaming as I don't do it.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl...

You may have been using settings on YouTube studio that was using all the capacity. 1080p on that link shows Video bitrate range: 3,000–6,000 Kbps

Another thing no one has mentioned is the device running the encoding, you can get warnings if your PC is slowing things down i.e. cannot encode frames fast enough and creating dropped frames.

So what you need to do is find out what settings are set in YouTube studio and check the PC performance is not maxing out the CPU

Edited by MrSaffron (Mon 16-Nov-20 13:33:53)

In reply to a post by MHC:

Just use Zoom and there will be no issues. Every user should be able to join using phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ...

Not everyone wants to use Zoom which asks for registration and software to be downloaded. And Zoom doesn't work on all browsers. Given the choice I'll take the FB feed. Your choice may vary, but give a choice!

A few points:
Yes we are attempting to achieve something like a poor man's version of UK broadcast quality, 1080 / 50. The current cameras are Sony domestic HD camcorders which are delivering quite reasonable pictures which match surprisingly well, but if this becomes the norm we hope to upgrade them fairly soon.
The YouTube and Zoom feeds will eventually be different, Zoom feeding in from homes to both a church congregation (Whenever!) and back out on the YouTube feed. I have monitored our current YouTube feed during tests and it is running at just over 9Mbps. We also have a decent network at the church, installed by one of my colleagues who is a professional in that field.

As others have suggested it is likely to be a device problem rather than a broadband problem.

Are you using one device for both Youtube and Zoom? I would suggest using a different device for each stream, this may mean two separate cameras. ( I am assuming a semi professional setup if you have the resources of that many members). Otherwise you will need to get a semi-professional mixing desk with dual outputs to the two different streaming devices. or a very high spec PC capable of handling two HD video streams at once (Quad CPU segregated across each stream.)

I am aware of quite a few churches streaming online services using less bandwidth than you. Some with less than 10Mb upload.

The Streaming / switching device is a Blackmagic ATEM mini pro which has a an ethernet connection to feed out directly over our network and comes with their own software ready installed. It also has a usb c output which can simulate a webcam, that feeds a separate PC which handles the Zoom side of things, but which carries the same input feed as YouTube. We have a Zoom professional licence I understand. The PC used for Zoom is a 3rd generation i7 running Win 10 I believe.
We will eventually be using all 4 HDMI inputs on the ATEM, probably 2 cameras, another PC for video clips, song words etc. and the fourth input for an output from the Zoom PC.

It's the simultaneous Zoom and YouTube operation which increases the demand The outgoing feed to the Zoom computer is 1080/50 which is also probably higher than many would use.
I'm pretty confident of our bandwidth needs, my son is also involved in live broadcast work which includes many zoom type contributions these days and confirms my figures.
Any suggestions of where we should be looking for reliable provision at these speeds?

The simplest and would provide some redundancy is a second line and maybe if G.fast is available with a good upload prediction getting that would be good. If your upload is only 17 Mbps on VDSL2 (max 20 Mbps) then you may not see much faster on G.fast, hence what the prediction is is important. If looking at a long term solution then an Ethernet (leased line) 100 Mbps symmetric line might be the way to go, but comes with a higher cost but also less affected by contention.

1080/50 should be entirely possible with 5 or 6 Mbps bit rate, you really need to spend some time looking at the settings used and experiment with the different bitrate/quality settings and then have some remotely watch feeds to evaluate. Once above 3 to 4 Mbps you will find most viewers won't be able to tell the difference.

Remember the feed to a PC maybe 1080/50 at a high bit rate of say 40 Mbps, but nothing to stop the client PC encoding at a different rate (raw 1080p HD is something like 1.6 Gbps, if brain recalls and broadcast kit tends to run at around 250 Mbps for recording). This is where your choice of graphics card in the PC comes into play as ones that support hardware encoding will be happy.

Thanks for all that, G.Fast A is available with a claimed upload range of 30-45Mbps, but the prices vary a lot with supplier, is that to do with contention or just competition? A second line is obviously an option, but cost is a significant factor in this, once we've reached an adequate quality threshold. Slim chance but I'd love to hear from anybody with current practical experience in this area. We're not in ay way an American Megachurch, just a medium size Methodist Church in the Thames valley which happens to have some relevant IT and broadcast experience in its membership (Thames Valley is more or less the Silicon Valley of the UK).

before spending money and/or getting second connection you need to do the basic of reducing stream upload quality to see if this improves things in terms of what YouTube is reporting, then end the quality up until you can see the connection is actually full.

5 Mbps with a decent encoder code (so even if uploading this twice just 10 Mbps upload) should look visually as good as things like live HD BBC iPlayer (I say live because pre-recorded material will use a two pass encode and this can look better than the single pass methods which is all you can do for live feeds)

wizzpilot

Your cheapest easiest and quickest solution is likely to be a 2nd FTTC connection this would prevent any contention between the two streams.

In the meantime ensure all other cloud services are off on all connected devices ( Including office 365, microsoft account etc) as these may try to start up and they will interfere with your upload. (Remember to check your office pc if it is turned on during the service.)

Also turn off wifi as when you have members on site they will all be connected to your wifi and this soon adds up. ( all those Bible apps they are using as well as social media feeds) . With only 30 people socially distanced in church you may have 25 phones on wifi!. I assume your broadcast team have already turned theirs off but easier to turn it off at the router. ( I know of people complaining about poor church wifi and then finding that there were 120 mobile phones trying to connect during the service. The router didn't have a chance!)

At present your single router may also be a limiting factor as it is having to handle the two live feeds that will all be smaller packets to get the audio / video quality. What router are you using?

Our router is a unified USG router I'm told, connected currently into a Plusnet modem, and there's a gigabit switch handling the distribution.
We're aware of the home made contention possibilities, less of a problem with only about 8 people in the building, office shut down. We'll turn the wifi off during services later on.

Edited by deleted (Mon 16-Nov-20 17:19:06)

Plusnet don't usually provide a VDSL modem. They use the BT Home Hubs which generally don't have a modem mode, so while you may have a powerful NAT router in the USG device, the Plusnet Hub One might be a bottle neck.

Of course you may have a different Plusnet device, so best to name it and then people can see if there is a modem only mode.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Plusnet don't usually provide a VDSL modem.

If they've had the connection a number of years, it could be an Openreach modem (e.g. HG612).

That is a possibility

I think the router was upgraded 18 months ago when we changed to FTTC but on the same payment tariff. I'll look next time I'm there, hopefully tomorrow.

Your setup is a little excessive, Netflix do 1080P around 5Mbps as does iplayer etc.

For those watching, a large majority will be on WiFi away from their router and the stream will reduce quality anyhow.

You should tweak your settings, people seem fine watching live iplayer on large screens. Those watching on zoom will typically be on much smaller screens and hence the quality requirements should be equal to or less than those required on big screens in my mind.

If you want to have the quality as it stands yes you need a faster line, although I know professional streamers on twitch etc who have 100k+ followers streaming out at 5Mbps in 1080p.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Why do you need both?

Just use Zoom and there will be no issues. Every user should be able to join using phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ...

<snip>

I'm doing a lot of Zoom events now with several local groups.
It has surprised me how many people just refuse to even think about using Zoom. It's not just age related. There is a substantial number of people who don't want their face on camera, as it were.
Probably nearly half of the previously active (went to local group meetings) are now not joining in. Best we see is phone calls between individuals.

I know from a friend that much of their online church services are being watched through You Tube.

You can use Zoom without the video side.

We often initiate training sessions with the participants camera OFF, they need to turn it on so have full control. Or do it as a Webinar, where no uplink video.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Your setup is a little excessive, Netflix do 1080P around 5Mbps as does iplayer etc.

Bear in mind that there is a large difference between watching a none live video stream and a live video stream. Basically there are more opportunities to maximise the quality on something that is not live at a given bitrate. Put another way you can't do a two pass encoding on a live video stream...

Consequently using bit rates from the likes of Netflix etc. for live video streams is not useful.

Yes hence why I was referring to iplayer also - specifically live TV comes in around 5Mbps on there.

For 1080P 60FPS you need around 9Mbps. I would move to standard 30FPS. That needs around 5Mbps... I suspect there won’t be much in the way of complaints.

End of the day users are coming in on a laptop / phone / tablet and these devices aren’t 65 inch tv screens. A few users may push it out to their tv over the YouTube app etc, but the quality won’t be worse than what we see on many live streams of tv.

It’s a cost benefit analysis, is it worth paying for g.fast for this use case - probably not. I doubt users will complain about a standard 1080p stream.

We rarely use the camera facility, but we are on calls several hours a day. Forcing camera on connection does cause complaint... it’s more an opt in facility in my mind. Got plenty of users on ADSL with 1Mbps upload and their quality is surprisingly OKAY on camera screen share etc.

Can I ask what is the point in running the service on Zoom?

On your subject header it says that you want to run the services simultaneously on both youtube and zoom. I just can't think of a situation where zoom is available and youtube isn't?

The only reason to use zoom would be if its an interactive service, which I assume its not as if its the same on youtube then those people can't interact. So it seems to be purely a viewing activity.

Youtube can be watched on pc's, smartphones, smart activated tv's, tablets etc, and many more. The youtube app has a far bigger reach. Some days when I'm watching my smart tv I'll load up the youtube app, sign in to my account and I can watch anything I would do on my computer.

There is an SDA church broadcast I watch every so often that as always done plenty of services through youtube, as well as saving them to file for archiving or if people want to be sent the service via a dvd.

Don't run at US frame rates (30/60), you'll get lighting flicker particularly if you have any LEDs or CCFLs. Stick to 25/50.

Contrary to what others have said, 1080p50 is easily achievable for live encoding at bit rates around 6 to 8 Mbit/sec. You'll sacrifice more quality on the encoding preset if you go too low, so how powerful your encoding PC is makes a meaningful difference.

Generally though unless your streaming PC is a potato, 'fast' or 'faster' will suffice for your average church service content.

The best thing to do is clamp bit rates to a CBR or pseudo-CBR encode pass, using something like OBS to ingest and encode the stream, you have more subtle control over the encoding parameters. YouTube have their own recommended parameters for encoding and bear in mind they will transcode to lower bit rates, so you want to send as high quality as possible. Zoom can politely do one!

Bear in mind with a 17 Mbit/sec upstream on your connection, unless that's the speedtested actual throughput, your real world available is going to be about 80% of that, plus you need to budget for spare upload to avoid TCP starvation and to avoid latency creep (more important as well if you are using the same connection to preview your live stream on YouTube simultaneously).

I wouldn't push that connection much beyond 11 or 12 Mbit/sec upload, but a Zoom (about 2.5 Mbit/sec at most) and YouTube (7 or 8 Mbit/sec) is definitely doable.

If you want advice on FFmpeg oneliners or optimised settings for OBS encoding, drop me a line. What's your current AV workflow, are you using OBS already to cut cameras or are you using a standalone desk like an ATEM then capturing its Program Out HDMI or SDI into a PC for encoding?

For many of us 17Mbs upload is a pipe dream. Here being 1km from the cabinet it has been optimised for 40Mbs download but a mere 6.5Mbs upload, which is more than adequate for Zoom on the receiving end.

We do live Zoom services each week, sometimes from our church but usually from people's homes. It is recorded and uploaded to UTube afterwards. Zoom is ideal for us as it allows various people to participate along with shared screen for hymns, prayers etc. I am not sure if that could be done that way via UTube which is more suitable for a single streamed source. And still not sure why you would want to do both.

Personally I am no fan of Zoom or similar but it is all we have at the moment - and we have managed to get many of our elderly members taking part, none of them particularly tech savvy, which is great.

Thanks for that reply; yes we are using a BM ATEM mini pro fed by a couple of Sony domestic HD camcorders and a PC for inserts and song words. The 4th input to the ATEM will be used either for zoom contributions or for a 3rd camera. The ultimate hope (not yet quite) is to allow those at home to contribute to a live service, with or without a congregation, which will be visible both on church screens and on YouTube.
During lockdown we've been running zoom service and they have been surprisingly popular although some of us don't rate the sound quality on music or the overall stability. I think may be able to get a G.fast supply at a surprisingly low price from one of the main ISPs, cheapest so far seems to be TalkTalk but EE look fairly competitive.
My son is the main director of the One live show other than news which survived the lockdown, and also has a degree which relates to all this so I have a fair idea of where we need to be. Our target is a minimum to do it all of 30Mbps.
We are out of contract in January with Plusnet, hence looking around now.

In reply to a post by dsergeant:

For many of us 17Mbs upload is a pipe dream. Here being 1km from the cabinet it has been optimised for 40Mbs download but a mere 6.5Mbs upload, which is more than adequate for Zoom on the receiving end.

We do live Zoom services each week, sometimes from our church but usually from people's homes. It is recorded and uploaded to UTube afterwards. Zoom is ideal for us as it allows various people to participate along with shared screen for hymns, prayers etc. I am not sure if that could be done that way via UTube which is more suitable for a single streamed source. And still not sure why you would want to do both.

Personally I am no fan of Zoom or similar but it is all we have at the moment - and we have managed to get many of our elderly members taking part, none of them particularly tech savvy, which is great.

Yep, not denying Zoom has its place, we use it company-wide along with Teams - I think it's one of the better of all the products because with Pro accounts you have the ability to enable highest fidelity and stereo audio on your feed to others, which is very useful for broadcast style use like OP explains.

Zoom recommends 3 Mbit/sec for 1080p30, which is not bad at all. Video quality is inferior to a well encoded YouTube stream, but it works and there's enough inertial knowledge amongst users to understand how to join a session. It's the cost I tend to balk at and some of the software design annoyances

In reply to a post by wizzpilot:

Thanks for that reply; yes we are using a BM ATEM mini pro fed by a couple of Sony domestic HD camcorders and a PC for inserts and song words. The 4th input to the ATEM will be used either for zoom contributions or for a 3rd camera. The ultimate hope (not yet quite) is to allow those at home to contribute to a live service, with or without a congregation, which will be visible both on church screens and on YouTube.
During lockdown we've been running zoom service and they have been surprisingly popular although some of us don't rate the sound quality on music or the overall stability. I think may be able to get a G.fast supply at a surprisingly low price from one of the main ISPs, cheapest so far seems to be TalkTalk but EE look fairly competitive.
My son is the main director of the One live show other than news which survived the lockdown, and also has a degree which relates to all this so I have a fair idea of where we need to be. Our target is a minimum to do it all of 30Mbps.
We are out of contract in January with Plusnet, hence looking around now.

In good hands then! ATEM Mini Pro is a handy little switcher, I guess you're using its integrated YouTube hardware encoder and USB interface for Zoom? I've been considering buying one for home use, can you tell I'm a broadcast engineer

If you have a paid Zoom account, definitely Enable Original Sound and stereo audio for your outgoing audio, which also removes any bandpassing or echo cancellation. Makes a huge difference to clarity and quality of your outgoing Zoom audio.

The options are buried slightly in the Zoom preferences:
Zoom main window -> Preferences cog -> Audio -> Advanced -> "Show in-meeting option to "Enable Original Sound" from microphone" and also "Use stereo audio" from the option which appears below that.

Make sure once in a meeting to hit the "Turn on Original Sound", then in the small arrow menu on the right side of the button, select the correct interface to always enable Original Sound. It makes a massive difference...

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/1150032794...
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/1150048304...

Are you using the ATEM's built-in YouTube streaming facility? If you're able to edit the streaming XML file on the unit, you can configure arbitrary multiple streaming destinations. Perhaps something like Restream.io (paid service) might be useful for you given your limited bandwidth, they essentially receive your 'primary' stream then 'reflect' it out bit-for-bit to additional services which you can configure, so you can stream simultaneously to Youtube, Zoom, Vimeo, Twitch etc without requiring multiples of upload bandwidth.

Nice video summarising the manual modifications of the ATEM's XML file to permit multiple streaming services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZx2tSuFjio
Or, using the Blackmagic software over USB to configure a YouTube stream key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaZU-TJHKLQ


Now, how to run your venue screens and mix between Zoom contributor for venue and for the stream...
At home, for quickly switching inputs to one of my displays I use a dinky passive "Port-Ta" 2-to-1 HDMI switched splitter, https://smile.amazon.co.uk/2-Ports-Splitter-Bi-Direc... - this might be useful on the fourth input of the ATEM to juggle a Zoom PC source and a third camera. It's nice because you have a mechanical switch, it doesn't just autosense active inputs and switch on its own like similar models do.


The biggest limitation of the ATEM Mini Pro is lack of an aux out like on their Television Studio line, but you could bodge venue monitor feeds by using the Zoom PC and also running OBS on it. Just need a secondary output from the PC to output a 'live preview' of OBS fullscreen - that becomes the feed to the venue projectors/TVs. The OBS scene can be configured with a predefined fade transition (triggerable by keyboard) between a Zoom program capture and an empty black scene / church logo.


Then you could then take that second display output, split it through a passive splitter and simultaneously feed to venue displays and also the ATEM's fourth input (through the passive 2-to-1 switch). With the short runs of cable you'd be using, you shouldn't have any signal problems.

Main requirement for something like this would be a decently powerful PC with multiple graphics card outputs. Most modern cards have at least one HDMI output and you can buy cheap DisplayPort to HDMI adapters if necessary.

I've bought "V AV Access" HDMI splitters and HDMI repeaters for use at home which would work for the method I described above. It's a bit hacky, but it does save about two grand...! Unfortunately "V AV Access" products are currently out of stock on Amazon, though similar products exist which could also fulfil splits for venue monitors (e.g. https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085VVBGW4).

Director would need to juggle a bit to cut up Zoom inputs on both OBS and the ATEM, but not too strenuous. OBS take/cut can be assigned to a keyboard button, and that method could feed both venue screens and the ATEM. You can just take audio straight from the PC for stream and venue mixes if you're doing audio outboard. Only remaining issue is the cleanfeed for Zoom contributors because they would need it for cue. For that you'd need an audio mixer with at least a couple of aux sends but it's not rocket surgery.


Consider some cheap HDMI to ethernet extenders and run decent shielded Cat5e/Cat6 to reach venue displays. I've found even quality HDMI runs inevitably suffer past ~30 metres. Again, I've bought some of these cheapish Chinese HDMI-ethernet extenders from Amazon to play with and had alright results. You can also buy units which can passively power either the receiver or sender unit down the wire off one PSU (total cable length dependent).


I'm sure your son could raid Studio V stores if you're struggling He'll probably read my suggestions and chuckle, they are a bit janky and shoestring budget... If you only have a small budget, hopefully they at least give you some inspiration. I always like being as flexible as possible even on a budget, what you want is definitely achievable without breaking the bank.




A&A or Zen are my usual first-tries, a few more pennies a month but service levels arguably better than most. Zen have had trouble with customer service recently given sheer volume of new business, but I think their product itself is as good as it always was. Spitfire, Structured Comms and Cerberus also offer G.fast but they're decidedly business-grade pricing.

Perhaps TalkTalk Business (formerly Opal, separate network) might be able to help? I remember them being keenly priced when my old work had LLU ADSL2+ from them. Is Virgin Media Business available in your part of town? VOOM top package is expensive but gives you decent upstream.

"My son is the main director of the One live show other than news which survived the lockdown, and also has a degree which relates to all this so I have a fair idea of where we need to be."

No need for the help on here then.

One thing I'd say is that if their getting a 17mbps speed test that already accounts for TCP/IP overheads