How to Avoid Ecamm Live Streaming Problems with Solid Internet

When talking about the best live streaming software for Mac, Ecamm Live  is one of the most popular at the moment. Having many functionalities built-in, Ecamm Live comes at very decent pricing per month. And with a 14-day free trial period, it's a great service to at least consider when choosing your live streaming program for Mac.

No matter how well you set up your streaming, your Internet connection is an important element that defines a successful live stream. In order to avoid Ecamm Live streaming problems on Twitch, Youtube, Facebook Live and other platforms, you'll need fast and reliable upload connectivity.

Dropped frames, buffering, pixelated video quality and even disconnects from the streaming server - these are just a few symptoms of a bad Internet connection. This ultimately means:

• being unprofessional to your audience.
• losing followers, if this happens frequently.
• losing progress in a game you're streaming with Ecamm Live on Twitch or people missing important bits from a discussion or interview.

This article explains how you can get a fast and reliable Internet connection at all times, so you can focus on the Ecamm Live streaming and not on fixing the problems of your Internet connection.

Why is your Ecamm Live stream experiencing issues? Why does Ecamm Live encounter network errors? How can you avoid dropped frames and buffering?

These are just a few of the questions that often come up in the live streaming community. Dropped frames, low stream quality and disconnects are usually related to connection issues. According to this article, for 4K video streaming, an upload speed of 25 Mbps is recommended. If you don't have that, you could contact your ISP and upgrade your plan, try on another streaming server, restart your network equipment - more in this comprehensive troubleshooting guide.

Broadcasting with Ecamm Live on Twitch requires a steady and fast Internet connection so your stream’s video quality doesn’t drop or disconnect. That’s why Internet connectivity is very important. Here at Speedify we get that - our service does everything to help avoid Ecamm Live streaming problems - from optimizing live streams to making sure you never get offline during a stream.

Ecamm Live is the preferred platform for live streaming for many Twitch content creators. Like any software for Mac, it’s got all the bells and whistles you may want built-in, and it’s very user-friendly. 

Since here at Speedify we help live streamers from Twitch and other platforms improve their broadcasts, we always want to know exactly how much our service helps content creators. So, we put Speedify to the test with Ecamm Live. Below are the results we got from testing and how you can enhance your live streams.

There are many online reviews and discussions where streamers agree that Speedify helps their live streaming. But we wanted to test it ourselves and see exactly how much it does that. Especially now, when we have the brand new Speedify protocol in place.

Test setup: our goal is to evaluate Twitch streaming improvements with Ecamm Live when using Speedify vs. not using Speedify. So we ran multiple tests on a full HD video stream. Data is according to the Twitch Inspector tool.

All tests were conducted via Ecamm Live on a Macbook Air Late 2015 featuring an Intel dual core CPU running MacOS 11.5.1.

Streaming video: 1080p @ 30 fps

Ecamm Live and Speedify settings were left to their default. When running, Speedify was connecting to the fastest available server, in Europe.

Testing scenarios: we tested with and without Speedify using one or more of these Internet connections:

• Bad Wi-Fi: a Raspberry Pi access point limited to 1 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload
• Wi-Fi connection: 50 Mbps download / 40 Mbps upload
• Cellular hotspots

Test results

First, we tested on an average Wi-Fi connection (50 Mbps / 40 Mbps). As you can see, when using Speedify, the average bitrate was improved by 40% vs. not using Speedify. And that's when using Speedify with only one connection (the Wi-Fi). This translated in better stream quality overall.

 

 

1080p @ 30 fps streaming	Wi-Fi No Speedify	Wi-Fi + Speedify	Wi-Fi + Cell + Speedify
Bitrate Average	2,625 kbps	3,695 kbps	3,363 kbps
Bitrate Max:	3,763 kbps	4,040 kbps	3,742 kbps
Bitrate Min:	275 kbps	0 kbps	2,272 kbps
Framerate Average:	30 fps	30 fps	30 fps
Framerate Max:	30 fps	30 fps	30 fps
Framerate Min:	30 fps	0 fps	30 fps

Then, we tested using the bad Wi-Fi connection, which should be similar to any public Wi-Fi you may be using to live stream IRL, for example. In this case, things really improved when adding Speedify and mixing that bad Wi-Fi with a cellular connection - that's a 125% improvement on the average bitrate.

 

 

1080p @ 30 fps streaming	Bad Wi-Fi	Bad Wi-Fi + Speedify	Bad Wi-Fi + Cell + Speedify
Bitrate Average	705 kbps	823 kbps	1,587 kbps
Bitrate Max:	1,163 kbps	1,319 kbps	3,983 kbps
Bitrate Min:	261 kbps	335 kbps	0 kbps
Framerate Average:	30 fps	30 fps	30 fps
Framerate Max:	30 fps	30 fps	30 fps
Framerate Min:	30 fps	0 fps	0 fps

Takeaways from the testing team

• Ecamm Live is light and easy to use, with enough settings for basic video streaming and supporting a lot of streaming services - Twitch, YouTube, Facebook Live, Restream, etc.
• Similar to Streamyard, Ecamm Live seems to decrease the quality of the video, but not the output resolution or the framerate.
• Adding Speedify on top of a regular Wi-Fi or to a bad Wi-Fi and tossing the cellular connection as well resulted in the best video quality.

Connection bonding for faster, more reliable Internet connectivity comes in different forms. Speedify is the software flavor. Another much more costly flavor is dedicated hardware rigs, such as the LiveU series or Peplink bonding routers. Ultimately it’s your choice, but here are the main perks Speedify brings to the table versus those hardware options:

• the Speedify protocol - opening up to 8 parallel sockets on each combined connection and intelligently utilizing them to prioritize your streaming traffic
• dedicated servers for those truly dedicated live streamers - more performance, closer to the streaming ingest servers, and guaranteed service level agreements.
• flexibility - you don’t have to carry a dedicated bonding device with you. Speedify can run on the device you’re streaming from. Or you can use Speedify to set up a custom dedicated bonding router on Windows or Linux, if you want.
• cost - only a small fraction of what you have to pay for the dedicated hardware.

Somebody whose company and job depends on successful live streaming said this about Speedify: