Streaming Into your Webinar or Online Meeting Using LiveU
By Jamie G
Remote webinars and online meetings have become the new normal in the workplace. Adding LiveU field units can enhance your webinars in ways you didn’t even think of. LiveU can provide high-quality and reliable video and audio from anywhere in the world. Dan Pisarski, VP Engineering, LiveU goes over why using LiveU will help you produce next level webinars.
Pisarski gives examples of why you would want to choose to use a encoder to stream live video into meetings or webinars. Here is what he says.
- “Your CEO might need to address the company from a remote location
- You might want to present a new product directly from a location that just won’t fit in a meeting room – such as from under the hood of a car looking at the engine, from an airplane hangar looking at a plane, or from the assembly line of your manufacturing plant
- You may even want to use your webinar for things like government meetings, non-profit meetings, or large enterprise meetings, where you have a large audience with a single or few presenters.
…and to make this happen you would want:
- The reliability of a dedicated encoder vs. software in your laptop
- The quality of a professional camera with a real lens vs. a webcam
- The bandwidth provided by bonding and cellular networks, whenever you don’t have access to reliable bandwidth at the location”
LiveU is the perfect solution to make all of these possible.
Before choosing LiveU for your metting/webinar consider these things.
- See if your meeting/webinar type can really match the use of a portable encoder such as LiveU.
- Think about who will be presenting and if they need to see of hear the audience
- See if your platform has a webinar mode that excepts an external encoder input.
If you are using a platform with webinar mode and RTMP input options you can stream to this destination directly form your LiveU Solo. Some platforms that allow this are Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace.
If you’re using such a platform, here are some typical steps to start streaming to them:
Dan Pisarski, VP Engineering, LiveU
1- Setup your webinar
2- Get your RTMP ingress info from the platform
3- Setup a destination with that ingress info on LiveU Solo Portal or LiveU Central
If you are using a platform without a webinar mode such as Zoom and Google G-Suite you can either baseband to webcam or stream NDI, NDI to webcam. Choose the option that seems to fit your hardware best.
Baseband to webcam allows you to take the baseband output (SDI of this server and plug it into a converter. This will make the input appear as a webcam to another computer.
When using the LiveU Solo or any other LiveU broadcast unit Pisarski says “…it is possible to receive the LRT stream and convert it to NDI (for the LiveU broadcast units), or receive the RTMP push stream and convert it to NDI (using the Garanin RTMP Mini Server). Once you have the LiveU stream as NDI, you can use the NDI to webcam driver to input the NDI feed to Zoom (or other programs that accept NDI) as if it was the computer’s local webcam.”
Check out the full article here!
Learn more about LiveU here!