Alternatives to HTTP streaming from H.264 Pro Recorder?

Howdy All!

I'm helping a teacher set up a morning news bulletin at the local high-school. We've got an ATEM 1M/E feeding into a H.264 Pro Recorder, which then goes through MXLight for HTTP streaming. Each classroom runs VLC and opens an HTTP connection to the machine running MXLight.

The problem is that we're getting reports of the stream stopping for some people, and they have to press "Play" on VLC to restart the streaming.

I'm suspecting that HTTP streaming might be a little less robust to network hiccups than, say, RTP or RTSP. Problem is, most of MXLight's streaming options are for pushing to some streaming service like UStream, which we're not allowed to use, as it would swamp the campus internet connection. MXLight does offer RTMP, but it looks like it want to push that to some re-streaming server. I've got Darwin server for doing stuff like that, but it supports RTP and RTSP, but not RTMP, I think.

So, I'm pretty stumped, at this point. Has anybody out there got a free-to-schools solution for live streaming over a LAN which is a little more resilient than HTTP?

MXLight supports RTP and RTSP as well as RTMP - could you use that into your Darwin server?

How many viewers do you have on the network viewing the stream? Just curious if the network is setup to support this kind of streaming. Maybe multicast would work better (if the networking allows this)

MXLight supports RTP and RTSP as well as RTMP - could you use that into your Darwin server?

Maybe. The last time I pursued that idea, something stopped me. I think it was either that MXLight wanted to push the stream to the Darwin server, and I couldn't. See, an extra wrinkle is that MXLight is running on a Mac Pro inside of Parallels. Clients get tunneled, properly, to the guest OS (Windows 7) running MXLight, but I've been having quite a time getting the guest OS to be able to connect to a port on the host OS (Mountain Lion).

I'll have to take another crack at it...

How many viewers do you have on the network viewing the stream? Just curious if the network is setup to support this kind of streaming. Maybe multicast would work better (if the networking allows this)

Today, it got up to 45 viewers.

The H.264 Pro Recorder is set to "1Mbps", but the actual bitrate seems to come out to a little under that (the video portion is only 784kbps). The port we're connected to is, at least 100Mbps, and might even be 1Gbps.

Multicast is at the top of our wishlist, but the campus network gods don't have it enabled on the routers. They said that it's one of their "would like to have it down the road" features, but they're kinda swamped with back-to-school craziness, at the moment.

See, an extra wrinkle is that MXLight is running on a Mac Pro inside of Parallels. Clients get tunneled, properly, to the guest OS (Windows 7) running MXLight, but I've been having quite a time getting the guest OS to be able to connect to a port on the host OS (Mountain Lion)

Me too: Mac with MXLight under Win7/Parallels. I'm early days in this though so may well run into the same problems, although I'm only trying to stream conventionally to a CDN so I'm hoping this will be ok.

Me too: Mac with MXLight under Win7/Parallels. I'm early days in this though so may well run into the same problems, although I'm only trying to stream conventionally to a CDN so I'm hoping this will be ok.

I think you'll be okay. For me... and for the solution which I was able to get working, the hardest part about getting it working was configuring the port-forwarding so that Parallels delivered incoming connections on port 8080 into the Windows 7 guest OS. You won't have that issue.

Other than that, you'll need to make sure that the H.264 Pro Recorder's USB is being fed to the guest OS, and not to MacOS. Oh, and you'll need to make sure that the guest OS can connect to the outside world, which I think just means using "Shared Networking" on the virtual machine for the guest OS.

Cool, thanks for that, I think I've got the USB and network sharing side set up ok, but I guess I'll find out when the ATEM units arrive (hopefully tomorrow)

Cool, thanks for that, I think I've got the USB and network sharing side set up ok, but I guess I'll find out when the ATEM units arrive (hopefully tomorrow)

You don't need the ATEM. Just feed any HDMI source into the Pro Recorder, and MXLight should pick it up.