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.