▍ Youtube?
In the era of bloggers and streamers, when the broadcast function is pushed into almost any device with a camera, it seems strange why they even needed to use any third-party services or, even more so, hardware solutions. From the outside it may seem that "yes, connect your mobile phone to Wi-Fi, start a stream, and now you have a ready-made broadcast!" But we quite often saw such solutions “on the knee” with delays, signal interruptions or glitch effects and could not treat the participants of our quest so carelessly, because the involvement in the project depended on the quality of the picture and stability.
In addition, we needed a low latency in the broadcast of the camera that looks at the keys of the piano, because the participants needed to see how the clicks recorded on the site were duplicated on a live piano.
And the third argument was that the entire bundle (at least the one that will be fixed on the piano) should work like a clock all 5 days, so that you don't have to put up a stepladder and "chemise" something there. Firstly, it would violate the scenario ("what kind of guy is this in the girl's apartment?"), And secondly, access to the broadcasting equipment would be impossible, because it is located inside the piano, and the lid after hanging the piano is no longer lift, she would be tightly pressed by the ropes:
For all these criteria, we did not use the same Youtube: the service does not guarantee the continuity of the broadcast, the delay is too high, and the settings and analytics capabilities are too scarce for us. We didn't even consider Twitch because of the ads being inserted into the broadcast, and we weren't sure about the stability of the broadcast. Discord, in which we organized a chat for participants, is not geared towards video streaming at all, and besides, it has a limited number of viewers.
And one more important point: none of these services have the ability to broadcast from multiple cameras, so that viewers can switch between the angles they are interested in.
This is what the octave of the piano looked like on the website:
And this is a view from a GoPro camera mounted on a piano and broadcasting the game of the quest participants:
In addition, every day at 12:00, our girl had to cut another cable, and this should also be seen without delay and with high quality, because with each cable cut, the probability that the piano will fall will be higher and higher.
We have already successfully worked with Facecast on other projects a couple of times, and when the idea of our quest was more or less formed, we invited them to participate.
The service scheme looks like this:
There are two key components: a cloud service and an encoder device. We connect cameras to one or several encoders, and the encoders themselves are connected to the network via wire, Wi-Fi or via a cellular modem - and you can show it to everyone. To view the broadcast, a browser is enough, no special applications are needed. The player will select the best resolution and bit rate for a specific device, so that the picture quality is the best, and so that there are no brakes. You can also embed a video stream into your page, for example, a meetup or landing page.
Hardware encoders are responsible for the uninterrupted broadcasting, which take the signal from the cameras, transform it and transmit it to the viewers through the cloud service. The company offers several models of encoders, we took the simplest one - Evacoder One , a small flat brick made of solid aluminum, all covered with cooling fins .
This model is intended for stationary broadcasting from premises. One camera can be connected to such an encoder via HDMI or SDI. The device supports modern video codecs H.264 and H.265 and transmits video at 30 frames per second and resolution up to 4K.
The most interesting thing is that you can connect to the Evacoder One network not only by wire or via Wi-Fi, but also up to 16 cellular modems at the same time. The device combines their bandwidth, and thus it is possible to transfer heavy 4K streams. When connecting via one 4G modem, it takes 10-30 seconds from the moment the signal arrives at the encoder until it appears on the service. But the final latency depends on the Internet for a particular viewer. Another feature of the service bundle and the encoder is stream buffering: even if the encoder's Internet connection is temporarily interrupted, the broadcast will go on continuously, and after the connection is restored, the stream will be seamlessly restored.
There are also many interesting things on the side of the cloud service. For example, there is a restream server and spectator access control functions to prevent pirated rebroadcasts from one account. There are rich audience analytics tools. You can even sell tickets for broadcasts through the service.
We had three broadcast cameras connected to three Evacoder One: one camera shot a general shot of the piano, the second shot it from the side of the cables, and the third camera shot a close-up of the piano keys:
Moreover, the encoder connected to the "keyboard" camera was hidden in the piano itself and survived the fall without any problems, without interrupting the broadcast for a moment.
▍ General impressions and failures
The first fuckup happened 20 hours after the start of the broadcast. The image from the two GoPro cameras began to twitch. We quickly realized that the problem was with the GoPro 7 camera stabilizer, which was overheated and "tired". The cameras were installed on tripods, so the stabilizer was not needed there at all and we turned it off, after which the image became stable again (and, by the way, the delay also became less, because now the cameras did not have to process video for stabilization and they immediately sent it to HDMI).
And the second fuckup happened at the most inopportune moment ...
As we already wrote, Evacoder One supports not only two independent wired Ethernet connections to the Internet, but also up to 16 cellular modems. As the main channel, we had a dedicated line from a local provider, consistently giving 250 megabits per second. It was impossible to stretch the second wired Ethernet, because the Internet was seized in the building by a monopolist who does not let other providers in (I think the situation is familiar to many organizations). Therefore, we had an LTE modem from Yota as a backup Internet channel. The studio is located next to a defense plant that jammed cellular signals and the LTE connection periodically fell off. But after 2-3 minutes the signal was restored and the next 4-5 hours behaved well, giving a stable 50 megabits per second.
We tested the primary and backup connections for four days and the connection was stable. The likelihood that both channels would fail at the same time was very small. And we decided to launch with these two channels.
Appreciate the irony: for five days the broadcast was conducted without interruptions, and at the very climax, the image from one of the cameras hung for about 12 seconds (general view, thanks to BuzzardDoc for recording). There is no failure on the recording that came to the server, but there was probably a slight disconnect between Evacoder One and the Facecast server due to a failure in the Internet connection, which caused the delay.
However, this became the subject of jokes in the quest chat about the fact that it was "photoshop" and the piano was not actually dropped, but carefully lowered. It's good that we were recording from 5 more cameras, and the moment of the fall was posted in a couple of hours. And a little later, the director's version was posted at all .
As for the rest, all 5 days the broadcast was conducted without failures at all, we never had to reboot the equipment, reconfigure something or "juggle" the cables, everything worked like clockwork.
Therefore, advice: do not neglect the backup Internet channels for your broadcast, the creators of Evacoder One have not in vain provided them with as many as 18 pieces.
▍ And finally, some screenshots and statistics:
The peak of the maximum viewers was at 12:00. It was interesting for everyone to see how a girl cuts another cable with a grinder.
According to broadcast statistics, we tracked the dynamics of audience interest:
We had no complaints about the quality of the picture, there were no noticeable artifacts of stream clamping, the resolution was enough, and even on a 27-inch monitor one could see flying sparks:
