How Reporters Use Live Streaming Technology
On the 187th episode of Speedify LIVE we hold a Starlink-focused Office Hours with the Speedify Devs, to discuss what we’re doing to learn more and make improvements!
We take viewer questions, discuss Speedify 13.2, and how we set up our Starlink stream and public spreadsheet collecting the Starlink data we learn from.
Here are our 5 takeaways from our Office Hours:
- Running a full-time livestream with Starlink we learned and changed up a few things: with its frequent dropouts Starlink alone is not enough, but to better test streaming with Starlink we now switched our second connection to a simulated DSL; we also dropped the resolution to 720P, enabled adaptive bitrate in OBS, and changed the reconnect settings in OBS to the maximum.
- We’re collecting stats from our 24/7 Starlink stream into this Google Spreadsheet! We set it up by writing a Python program that runs on the PC running the Starlink stream, and using the Speedify CLI and the stats command we pull out stats from Speedify, submit it into an N8N workflow, and when a request comes in, we parse the data and put it into a Google Sheets API so we can have an updating spreadsheet!
- If you’re looking to use Speedify on a Raspberry Pi, there’s a few things to keep in mind: you don’t need much RAM to just run Speedify, but you may need an extra power-source for some connections – a powered USB hub may help; there’s also a speed cap of about 400Mbps, as the Pi 4 doesn’t have hardware encryption!
- When combining two 4G connections and an ethernet on a Raspberry Pi, you have a couple options for sharing Speedify: use the built-in Wi-Fi adapter to share with other devices via Wi-Fi Hotspot, or you can purchase a USB Ethernet adapter to give you a second ethernet to share over. We do have guides for sharing Speedify via Wi-Fi and Ethernet in our knowledge base!
- Speedify does have some Quality-of-Service features built in! With the Enhanced Streaming mode, when we recognize that something is a stream, like RTMP, a WebRTC or VoIP call the app knows it’s important and will apply quality of service settings to it automatically, making sure it gets the best quality!