URGENT: ATEM Mini Pro LOW DATA RATE & VERY POOR STREAM

Hi everyone,

I have seen quite a few posts about this with no real solution and I'm hoping that maybe someone with a solution will see this and help. I have a very important 3 day performance that I have been paid to livestream THIS WEEKEND and during the tech rehearsal, the ATEM completely stopped working. It had a very low data rate varying from .02 - .12 MBPS. I did not take note of the cache at the time because I did not know what it meant, but I do remember seeing that it went pretty high at one point, I believe into the 80% range. The internal recording was very poor quality and the livestream was also very poor quality with no sound even though the ATEM was receiving sound.

Here are the details.

Streaming to Vimeo
Output on ATEM: Streaming High Quality
1080p 30 fps

Everything is hardwired with Cat6 ethernet cables to the router through a network switcher.

2 Blackmagic Cameras (4k & 6K)
Recording in camera at 4K BM RAW (Q5)
Sound board running sound into Mic 1 of ATEM

Internet was upgraded to a higher bandwidth and didn't make any difference. Streaming worked the day before on same internet. Did a speed test before the internet was upgraded and it was Ping: 4 Download: 82 Mbps Upload 91 Mbps

I have done a ridiculous amount of research and cannot find the solution. Some of the things I think it could be are:

1) Throughput of internet is low (I do not know how to test this)
2) ATEM cannot compress into H.264 fast enough to transfer and so it's getting backed up in the cache
3) There is an issue with Vimeo and ATEM together (possible variable data rate vs. constant data rate)
4) Read something about a variable vs. constant stream key but again I'm not sure what this means or if it's part of the issue.

Any help you can give would be GREATLY appreciated. I cannot have this as an issue by this weekend as we are streaming to 100s of paid ticket holders and it would be quite disastrous for this to fail.

Thanks.

This is pretty crazy, but testing again now and having no issues. Could this be weather/ISP related?

Yes, it could totally be ISP related.

What type of internet connection is it? 'Cable TV' based? (i.e. like Comcast?). In many, many such deployments, you are sharing the upload bandwidth with all the other customers in your 'neighborhood'. If your 'neighbors' are all churches on Sunday morning - you all might be contending for the same limited bandwidth at the same time.

And even in non cable type infrastructures, there is some point where your bits will reach a router in the ISP's infrastructure that connects it to the 'internet', That connection is shared with all their customers - and is likely sized for 'average' loads, not 'peak'. If all their customers are trying to upload, some traffic may get throttled or experience delays, which leads to buffering in the ATEM, which works until you run out of buffer space...

It's similar to traffic on the highway - if there is a one lane bridge anywhere between your house and work, you may experience delays based on time of day, etc.

Do you really need to use the 'High Quality' setting in the ATEM for Vimeo? I don't have experience with Vimeo but they may not be able to ingest at that rate. Have your tested with a lower setting to see if that works better?

Bandwidth is the culprit. Who else is on the network when you're streaming?

Try streaming at low. It's still going to be very good quality. Keep others off the network when you're live.

Best,

David

atem mini pro and atem mini express me, it has given me that problem this week, in different places, with other Chinese encoders I am doing very well, and with vmix too, I will not use the ATEMs for streaming until there is a solution, I will put other encoders to this, and the sad that my new webpresenter hd is also having these problems, I'm bored.

Craig and David,

Sorry I've been in livestream land and just seeing these. We are using Verizon Fios and in a very busy part of NYC so the throttling makes a lot of sense. It just so happened on a rainy Sunday afternoon too, so probably a lot of people staying inside on their computers. We upgraded the internet, but not sure this will make a difference this Sunday when we have the real show. We shall see.

I will definitely try low streaming on both ATEM and Vimeo if we have some issues. The program is only an hour so cross your fingers!

Thanks SO much for your reply. It is greatly appreciated.

What I have learned about livestreaming:

YouTube and I assume Vimeo as well does not like it when a stream sent to them looses packets or dropped frames. When this happens YouTube will freak and just go black. So bad. This can happen at what ever upload speed you have. So you really need to use bonded technology. That really is the only way to livestream. Yes if you go the super pro route it is way too expensive. So this is what I do and maybe it will help.

I have a mini PC which only has two pieces of software running on it. 1 is Speedify, this takes all your different connections and bonds them together to give you a constant reliable stream. 2. is Connectify, This is a digital router and with it you can setup different ways of how you want to share your internet connection.

So my Mini POC has two Lan ports. One port I set with Connectify to send the internet out to an external router, which I connect to my Atem via Cat6. The other Lan port is used as a regular source of internet coming in (if available). But in the venue I am using it at coming up does not have ethernet available, only wifi. So i connect my Mini PC to the WifI as 1 source. Then I have a 4G LTE iPhone connected via USB, tethered as hotspot. Plus a data SIM card inside a 4G LTE dongle connected to the PC. So I have three separate connections all connected to the PC and Speedify bonds them together to create one stable stream. This stream is sent out through Connectify to the router then to the Atem.

Then from the Atem I stream to restream which sends a steady strem to youTube or Vimeo. So if for what ever reason I loos a packet or drop frames, restream will still send a steady stream to youtube so they dont freak out.

With this I have been able to stream at the 1080P 30fps high quality. Knock on wood! Hope this makes sense.

Wow @mykdw1 that is great information! Thank you so much for this info. I'm definitely going to give this a go and see if it solves the issue the next time we have problems. Really appreciate this advice.

I am glad I could help. I hope it works out for you!

Any updates on this and still working good?

I’m in the middle of a conference and have had this issue to the extent where Restream has refused to even start the stream because the bitrate is too low.

My observation has been that the bitrate, for me at least, is DIRECTLY related to the kind of content being streamed. The more static the image, the lower the bitrate. Makes sense, in the sense that the simpler the image the less data needs to be sent. However, when I’ve got a pre-service reel of static images cycling through and the bit rate drops to less than a mb/s and the stream won’t get picked up by the host, that’s a problem.

My work around has been to send my program feed to OBS as a direct pass through and encode from there, which I despise because the added compression is very noticeable. Using another encoder such as a LiveU or Resi Ray Encoder seems to be the only solution until BMD allows the ATEMS to have more stable nitrates regardless of content.

As I wrote in another thread:

we don't use the ATEM Mini but we used the Webpresenter HD which should be similar regarding the streaming engine.

I've mentioned this before and talked about the issue with a BMD Rep. but they didn't seem to care. All BMD encoders have the problem that they do variable bitrates not constant bitrates. You can easy test this by setting your Atem to 4MBit video bitrate and switching from a camera image to a still image or a powerpoint slide and back to the camera after 30 seconds. With the camera image you will have a avarage bitrate about 4MBit as set in the profile but as soon as you switch to the still image, the bitrate will drop to around 300-500kBit. That is not the problem but when you switch back to a camera the encoder will freak out and go up to 9-10MBit to keep up with the sudden changes in the frame. That spike overpowers most of all network connections and of course most CDNs.

That is why we trashed all of our Web Presenters and bought other encoders that won't exceed the setting that we make. IMHO all BMD encoders are not reliable and prone to freak out the bitrate everytime when coming from a low complexity content to a high complexity one. They are IMHO simply not suitable for solid streaming. Buy some other encoders that do their job well.

Cheers

Robert

This worked for me.

Streaming with ATEM mini Extreme ISO.
My connection is stable with 400 mb/s up+down.
Streaming HD 1080p to Vimeo RTMPs
High quality: 10mb/s max

After a few minutes my stream freaks out and the cache of the ATEM starting to fill.
Very frustrating.

A read the variable datastream from the encoder to Vimeo was the problem.
After using OBS as an encoder the stream was fine. Stabilized so no problem for Vimeo, so to say.

At Vimeo they give some restrictions due to the plan you're paying for.
Premium account (mine) is limited to 5mb/s I found out.
I restricted my output to a 5mb/s max and guess what... this worked for me. No more caching

source: https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/article ... deo-issues