How to Stop Buffering When Outside Live Broadcasting

Nothing can turn your audience away faster than lengthy buffering issues or choppy outside live broadcasting.  It happens all over the world, but here’s the good news: it does not have to happen.

Why Your Video Is In “Buffer” Mode

There are a lot of reasons why your outside broadcast transmission may result in a laggy and stunted video, including:

• There is a poor routing connection between the server you or your service provider is using for streaming and the location of your encoder
• You are exceeding your bitrate
• You do not have enough upload speed on your internet connection for the bitrate you are encoding at
• You are overusing your encoder drains which adversely drains your computer
• The proximity of the server is causing the viewer to have a poor connection to the server
• The viewer has a slow download speed which is not able to keep up with the bitrate or the source

The bad news is that some of these issues are reliant on the recipient of the video stream, but the good news is that by ensuring that you have the right outside broadcast equipment, you can largely reduce number of viewers who may become frustrated when viewing a clunky and laggy live streamed video.

Save Time and Check the Encoder

If you are experiencing issues getting your data pushed from an outside broadcast video link through to the streaming server, go to your encoder.  The encoder should be set to “auto-adjust” so that it can alter the quality of the video.  Yes, you will drop frames, but it is better for the quality to take a hit than to have video that jumps and skips all over the place.

Check Your Megabits per Second

You may have a fantastic internet connection, but there is a good chance that the rest of your audience does not.  Your outside broadcast transmission should send a megabits per second of no more than 1Mbps, otherwise it may surpass your viewers’ viewing capacity.

If you plan on using multiple bitrates then make sure that one is greater than 1 Mbps and one is lower.  For example, lets say you want to stream in both High Definition (HD) and Standard Definition (SD).  You will then have to different bitrates.

• The HD bitrate will be greater than 1 Mbps
• The SD bitrate will be less tan 1 Mbps

When set this way, those who can enjoy greater quality footage are able to while those who cannot can still view your content and both parties are spared slow and choppy video footage.

Test Your Upload Speed

Upload speed is everything when it comes to live streaming, and several devices on the market today specialize in optimizing upload speed.  You can still test your upload speed at testmy.net.  The best way to run a test is to run three independent test and to then average them together to see what the average bitrate speed is.  Ideally the bitrate speed should be greater than that what you are broadcasting with in order to ensure a seamless live stream broadcast.