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Live streaming has been a key part of many peoples experience of church over the last few years. Our Easter service’s provided me with the perfect opportunity to test this upgrade to our system, I have been hoping to do so for some time now.
You can watch our Good Friday and Easter Sunday service’s online to see our system in action for yourself.
Our Good Friday service went incredibly smoothly. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for our Easter Sunday service. Although things went well in-house, our streaming encoder (OBS) crashed thrice during the stream. Thankfully, due to upload delays, not much of the stream was lost by the time I restarted it. However, this has shown me that maybe our computer isn’t powerful enough.
To break it down a little further, here are some things about our new computer set-up.
- During our service one (2021) M1 Mac Mini is running:
- 2 monitors, 1 Projector (splitting the signal to 2 projectors), 1 TV comfort monitor
- ProPresenter 7.9
- OBS studios
- Safari + Mail
- Sending 2 NDI outputs from ProPresenter to OBS
- Receiving a Camera NDI from my iPhone
- Sending audio via USB to a sound desk and receiving audio back via the same USB.
This is a lot.
For one computer to handle so much is a big ask. As a new M1 Mac Mini, I was hoping this computer could cover it all. However, it’s appearing that in order to have regular livestreams I am going to have to problem solve this particular issue.
At this stage I’m unsure of the best way forward. There are a few options I think available:
1. Upgrade & Replace
The Mac Mini was one of the first generation Macs with an M1 chip.
Since its release, Apple has worked to improve and surpass its creation.
This year, Apple released the Mac Studio for the first time. A ridiculously powerful machine.
One option could be to replace our Mac Mini with a more powerful Mac. Either a higher end Mini or one of the new release Studio’s.
This could help with reaching the processing power necessary on one machine, however is an expensive option.
2. Add a second Computer
Another option is to add a second computer as a ‘streaming computer’. This option was recommended to me by my brother in law (and fellow computer technician). Adding a second Mac Mini could alleviate some of the processing work from our display computer.
This would probably be cheaper than replacing our existing computer, however does add more work for our Tech Team.
3. Do nothing & hope for the best
Finally, we could also do nothing. As we are not yet streaming every week, this problem is not so urgent that I need to make a decision today.
We could also hope this issue doesn’t happen again, however as it has already happened three times I am not very hopeful.
If we don’t change anything, we will continue to have streams that crash.
On-top of our necessary computer upgrade, we also desperately need a Wifi upgrade. My hope is to look into this as well very soon. This has been overdue for some time now, so will be great to finally get it sorted. Thankfully I have a contact who has promised to take a look and do a quote for me.
Check out the service and crashes for yourself bellow.
Boswell's Brain 
2 thoughts on “Experimenting at Easter”