Legacy Live Streaming - Ingest Profiles

Hello,

When livestreaming using the QVP, you come across the choice of selected different ingest profiles.

An ingest profile basically tells our platform how many streams in you will be sending, and also what bitrates they will be using,

The platform has a few different choices, and while we are not going to go through all of them here, I would like to explain a bit on when to use what profile, and some things to consider when selecting your ingest profile.

Lets look at some of the profile names and what they mean.

720p 16:9 HD 1

720p - The first number indicates the resolution of the stream - in this case 720p. We also have 576p and 1080p options available.

16:9 - Tells you the screen dimensions of the stream. 16:9 is also referred to as horizontal.

HD - Indicates it being a High Definition stream. Any stream that is 720p and up is considered High Definition. Anything below that, such as 576p would be a Standard Definition stream (SD).

1 - Indicates the amount of streams you will be sending in.

So by selecting the profile above, you tell the platform that you will be streaming in 720p, horizontal and High Definition, and you will be sending 1 stream in.

If the stream has the text "Timeshift" in front of it, indicates that the output stream will be timeshift enabled. Timeshift basically gives you a live stream where you skip back in time in the stream. How far back you can go in the stream depends a bit on how big the window for the timeshift is. A window is basically a set amount of time, 1, 2 3 or more hours, where the content of the stream is buffered to enable skipping back in time in the stream.

How to pick what ingest profile to use?

This depends on several factors, but some of them are,

• Bandwidth where you are streaming from. (Internet capacity.)
• Encoder hardware / Software

Bandwidth is important for streaming, if you know the premises you are streaming from will have very limited bandwith, it might be prudent to select perhaps a Standard Definition (576p) profile, using only a single stream in. The drawback of this is that you will not be able to offer a multiple bitrate for output.

The single bitrate option is also prudent to use in cases where you may for example have a good internet connection, but the computer you are streaming from is not able to handle more than one input stream.

Some encoding software, such as OBS, only handles single bitrate output, and when using OBS you should select the 1 bitrate option.

On the flipside of this, if you know you are on a good network connection, and have a good encoder or computer with software encoder, you can pretty much choose any of the multiple stream options available.