problems streaming music videos

[DThompson551]

I make music videos for our congregation. I deliver mp4 files and they play them directly from the church's zoom computer. I am almost always disappointed the quality over zoom. They get choppy and laggy and parts drop out. Prerecorded video conversations don't seem to have the same issues, or maybe they're less noticeable. Live stream music, choir and piano, is fine. Just prerecorded music. We even do rehearsals the day before and they sound fine then. It's just on Sundays, possibly because hundreds of people are logged in? This has been going on for a while it's nothing new. The videos are 1920x1080. The music is recorded at a loudness level of -15LUFS. The music is in stereo, I wonder if that's the culprit? Any ideas?

[Dan_ZoomSE]

Hello @DThompson551,

If the videos look and play fine except on Sundays, it is most likely related to network congestion.  

Make sure they have a Ethernet cable for the computer and not wifi if possible.  Make sure they are checking the boxes to optimize for full screen video and share computer audio.

Also, is they have a lot of users connecting to the network, it would be recommend to have their IT person create a vlan for the Church’s computer to separate it from all

others and allocate more bandwidth to them.

If this has answered your question, please click the Accept as Solution button below so that others in the Community may benefit as well.

Thanks!

[DThompson55]

That's cool. Yes the Zoom computer is cabled to a router, and from there to the modem. Because of covid protocols there is only one other person with a device in the sanctuary, so there are just two devices using that network. We had the church internet upgraded to fiber last year. Again, most videos play properly. It's just these few music videos. It might be that zoom can't handle music, or that it has to do extra work to mix stereo down to mono so it can send it, or that it has to do extra work to adjust volume levels with music, or that it can't keep up sending to hundreds of people with the processing required for these music videos. We just don't know. What we're going to try next week is to render the music videos down to mono and see if that makes a difference. After that we'll try rendering to a lower screen resolution, maybe 1920x1080 causing the issue, But other 1920x1080 videos look and sound good, and you'd think video processing would take more bandwidth than audio processing. We have no idea.

[Alex_PFT]

Are you using the regular sharing option, or are you using the advance video sharing option? I would use the later, since it's optimized for video.

Sharing and playing a video – Zoom Support

[DThompson55]

Thanks! We have VMIX going into zoom. So the advanced options for sharing video files directly do not apply.