You Tube - scheduling events, stream keys, 1080p, stopping stream

Hi - I’m loving my Pearl Mini. But I have a couple of questions re: workflow when streaming to YouTube (YT). The use is a house of worship, with service wardens responsible for starting and stopping the stream, and sometimes switching camera layouts. (We used to use the Webcaster X2 until YT broke it with their API update. We’ve also gone multiple camera now for pic-in-pic display).

My desired workflow - Non-technical person presses stream on Pearl Mini, device streams to YT, then press stream to stop stream. Next non-technical person comes along a week later and does the same. No need to schedule events in YT, no need to log in to YT to either turn on ‘stop stream’ setting or press ‘end stream’ from YT stream control panel.

Challenges:

  1. I seem to need to create or schedule an event in order to get a stream key from YT to enter into the Pearl. Once that event is over, the next event has a different stream key and so I’d need to go in and update the Pearl Mini. (We can’t afford £96 per month for remote access). Without this, when the next person presses stream, Pearl Mini appears to be streaming, but to the old key and so it’s now live on YT.

Is it possible to schedule one event in ten years’ time and to keep resusing it perhaps?

  1. Stopping stream. When stopping the Pearl Mini from streaming, YT keeps waiting for data and keeps the stream alive indefinitely. It is possible, once the stream is live, to log in to YT and open the stream centre and select the auto end setting. In future events YT seems to keep this setting (and I appreciate this bit is a YT question not an Epiphan one) but I’m worried it may revert in future. Assume others have faced similar challenges and so keen to hear what they did.

  2. 1080p - My Pearl Mini channel is set to output 1080p. But YT seems to only go as high at 720p in the stream. Bandwidth, internet speed, system resources etc should not be a problem. I seem to be able to create a new stream key in YT for 1080p but how will the Pearl Mini know/be able to access that? (Given that I don’t want to have to create a new event each week, I just want start-stop functionality)

I appreciate this might not be helped by a million Zoom stream key settings sitting in there as we sometimes stream a Zoom meeting, and that seems to create a new key each time too.

Thanks in advance for any help people can give.

Hello,

The type of workflow you’re after is already possible using Youtube (to a degree). If you create a custom Stream Key it will become persistent, meaning it could be used multiple times. You can also enable auto-start and auto-stop so simply starting and stopping the stream from the Pearl will also start/stop it on Youtube as well.

The only thing you would have to do is to create the new event each time in the Youtube dashboard, if you select “re-use settings” from a previous stream than it will re-use the same stream key, meaning that no changes need to be made in the Pearl web interface in order to stream to a new event.

You can view more details about this on the YouTube help page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9854503?hl=en

If you still want remote access to the Pearl interface but can’t afford the pro cloud account there are a number of ways to do this, we actually have a white paper we created on this topic which lists at least 3 different ways of having remote access to the Pearl for free, you can email info@epiphan.com for a copy of this white paper.

With regards to the 720p YouTube limitation this should not be happening, YT has been capable of 1080p and higher for quite some time and many Pearl users are streaming 1080p (or higher) every day. You can set the YouTube stream to use manual settings (as opposed to auto-detection) and this may help. This has nothing to do with the Pearl, provided that the streaming channel is set to 1080p of course.

Hope this helps!

Thank you Adam, you’re a star! Quick reply too. Much appreciated.

I understand what you’re saying in terms of reusing the key and quickly adding a new scheduled event. I wonder if I can schedule many events in advance? I’ll look into it, that’s YT not you.

Either way, it will mean the person in the room can start / stop without any worry… or technical knowledge!

I will email for the white paper.