Offline / Insufficient bandwidth

We have been sending a test stream to Facebook Live from the X2 for several months and today we went live on Live. Overall it was a good experience, but I have been fighting a couple of anomalies with the X2.

  • Device goes offline - this usually happens for a couple of seconds and then we are reconnected, but today during the Live session, we disconnected once for around 10 seconds which made me nervous. I have tried several things to resolve this. We have run a new dedicated cat5e cable between the encoder and the network switch. I have assigned a static ip address to the encoder. From a workstation on the same network, I am pinging both the encoder and the Google DNS (8.8.8.8) and I never drop a ping to either. I would have expected to drop pings to the encoder when it goes ‘offline’.
  • Insufficient bandwidth - a couple of times today and during our test last week we received ‘insufficient bandwidth’ messages during the service. I have the stream set to 2Mbps. We have a 1Gbps up / 1 Gbps down connection and there were 13 people on campus today. I can get with the ISP to see if they show any spike in usage during our service.
    Any thoughts on these 2 issues?

This is likely a networking or firewall issue given that you are on ethernet, ping tests continue to work to the encoder and externally, and you have allot of bandwidth. I would recommend speaking to the network admin regarding this, it might be firewall or QoS rules, especially for Facebook as it streams out over port 80 which can easily run into QoS rules issues.