Two days down, one to go. BAE webcast went better today vs yesterday. I only had to work around the network issue the one time around 11-11:15ish. Uplink bandwidth dropped down to 300kps and QoS to 4% with 1.5-1.9s pauses at this point. During the afternoon the stream was run at 350kbps without issue. I ran at 450kbs early in the day without issue on my end, but the playback end was jerky/choppy.
Lessons learned:
. you can keep dropping bit rates while running Adobe FME, but below 300kbs it isn't really worth using the flash media encoding
. the ustream channel seems to get disconnected for bandwidth or latency issues when running with FME - my guess is if the buffered bits bleed down on broadcast and if it can't get more in time, then you get disconnected and are forced to reconnect/resync. Just seems that way to me, ymmv.
. using the ustream.tv/pull (no FME), you won't drop the connection no matter what. It will just pick up what data is available when it can transmit it next. So, it will get jerky and be of lower quality... but its not a blank screen (not much endorsement there!)
. total bandwidth being used up is video+audio and with FME the minimum is another 98kps - kept forgetting that.
and finally...
.
www.internetfrog.com is your friend - it has a measured download/upload/round-trip-time/QoS/max pause time for a sample transfer chunk. Monitoring the network with this every once in awhile can give you a sense of what's going on and how safe it is to push transmit rates up or revert back to an FME stream. I've got a screen capture I'll post -- it shows 9kbps upload capacity. Yikes - not much I could do with that! (The link is a T1 and I often got 2Mbps up/1Mbps down early in the morning or after the end of competition.)