Hi.
I am the technical manager of a cultural venue, and we have a Pearl Mini that we use for streaming events on some of our rooms. We have been using the Pearl Mini for about a year now and it’s been working fine until a few weeks ago.
Recently we are experiencing connection issues while streaming to youtube. We don’t stream to other platforms, so I can’t compare it to other streaming services in order to find out if the issue is with youtube or with our network or the encoder itself. However, we do have a Tricaster that we use for our biggest rooms (Auditoriums), and we don’t experience any problems when streaming from the Tricaster. So it seems safe to assume that there is no issue either with our network or with youtube’s servers.
Yesterday we had a stream that got a “connection timed out” error after about 20 minutes of streaming. What happens is that the encoder loses the connection and is unable to resume it, so we need to create a new stream. This usually works, but it’s annoying both for our technical staff and for our customers as their viewers miss parts of the event and have to get a new link to continue watching the event. However, this didn’t work yesterday. We tried creating a new stream, but it also went down within 5 minutes. Then we attempted a third stream, but this also went down within a couple of minutes. We did a speedtest on our network and had around 500mbps download and upload speeds. We did a few additional speedtests and the network seemed to be stable on our end.
So our conclusion is that the issue has to be with the Pearl Mini. It has worked fine for many months, but suddenly in the last few weeks it has started failing. We have not done any changes to our network. No ports are changed, the unit is running the latest firmware, so there doesn’t seem to be any reason why this should happen. Is the unit failing on us? Is this a common issue? Are others experiencing similar problems? Is there anything we can do to prevent this from happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated!