Over the past few weeks we have been experiencing some issues with our Sunday video streaming. It was hard to put a finger on it, but the viewers we commenting that the stream would “pause” a lot. So when I did some digging in to it, I found something rather ugly.
Up until this past Sunday we were using a recycled PC with windows XP and Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) for sending our video stream. What I found ugly was that the Windows Update service was still running in the background. Now don’t get me wrong, Windows Update was not the cause of my problems, but it did contribute. I had turned off windows update, but this service continues to run even though it is not doing anything. Another service was the java update monitor. All off these extra processes was pushing the recycled computer to it’s limit when combined with FMLE. It was obvious that it was time to upgrade.
With all of the plans to introduce new media software and some Macs to our production environment, I figured why not put in a Mac for our streaming server. Some research into FMLE for the Mac revealed that it works fine, but eventually I want to put in a production application that will give us a little more control over the content that we are streaming. The long term goal is to run an application like Telestream WireCast which will allow the operator some more control over the streaming content rather then just everything we send to our venues.
So this weekend was our first weekend with the Mac running FMLE and everything went great with not “pausing” or hic-ups. I simply swapped one system box for another and we were golden. So much that when I asked viewers for feedback on the new equipment one viewer commented that it was the best Sunday experience they had seen all summer.
So with that we move forward with one more Mac added to the control room. At this rate, they are starting to multiply like bunnies.
