Apologises for last night’s unmitigated disaster with the live stream of BOUND on SHIBARI.TV. It seems the stream was pretty much unwatchable and a jerky slide show at best.
I was gutted as every time before the stream has been fast and pin-sharp. In tests, I ran 3 cameras without problems from the new i7 laptop I bought expressly for the job. It seemed fine in all the tests at home. On the night, very quickly both input and output previews became very choppy and distorted and there was a massive delay in transmission. For some reason, even with only 1 USB port in use (no hub), I got “USB bandwidth exceeded” a little way into the transmission. The brief signal losses were me changing USB port but none of the 3 gave any improvement.
At the venue, I got 5mpbs download, whereas at home I get 50mbs and 15 upload, so presumably their upload speeds would be way less pro-rata. It is possible that might have made it too slow for 720HD but reducing image/resolution size didn’t seem to change things and I can’t see how it would affect the input preview anyway. I think it must be USB conflicts or handling as the problem mainly seems to be between camera and software. A time delay I can live with as long as the images are smooth and clear.
The stream is hosted on Daily Motion’s DMCloud service so should be OK, even with the close on the 1,000 viewers we had. I suspected the booster in my 10m USB camera cable but that seemed OK when tested at home later. It’s a new laptop and I did notice Windows doing a massive update when it was shut it down after BOUND so maybe there was some outdated USB handling? I hear Vista had issues but I’m on Win 7 which should have resolved any such problems.
If anyone reading this has any bright ideas, please send me a message. I’m out of my depth and will have to resort to my old friend Google.