Tools for Streaming Audio and Video

[wbcderek]

This is a relative new addition to our website and I'm trying to find out how other are accomplishing this and want successes and failures they've encountered because of it.

We use Streamhoster for our hosting, and the free encoders for Real Player and Windows Media. So far we have had good results with the videos that we produce for in house use. Our next challenge is to get our sermons online.

This is my question what hardware and software are you using to accomplish this? We currently have a cassette ministry so the audio is captured though I'd rather capture directly to digitial. Our services are mixed for video and audio so we have an appropriate output that we use for our overflow and is also broadcast on our inhose tv system.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Derek

[mrbelfry]

I have an mp3 recorder that I use to capture the sermons digitally (using a spare auxillary on my mixing desk). I then transfer it to a pc using a usb connection and edit it slightly. I'm not sure what the policy on this board is for advertising products so feel free to pm if you want more details.

I used to capture to tape and then use a walkman to play that back through my pc soundcard but I found that this added lots of noise. Using the mp3 recorder is much quicker and I get a better sound.

I've never put these online - I have a dial up connection so it would take me a long time. Generally speaking I much prefer to be able to download video/audio rather than stream it because my connection speed means I get a lot of stuttering.

[David Gillaspey]

Yes, everyone, feel free to mention actual products, unless you financially benefit from the mention. And I'm not necessarily against that if you provide disclosure.

For streaming, you definitely want to capture the audio at the highest quality possible ? therefore, digitally.

At the small church I formerly served (as director of the audio ministry), we purchased a Tascam CC-222 rackmount combo tape recorder/CD recorder (see http://www.tascam.com/Products/CC-222.html) for, I think, $600. That enabled us to record sermons straight to CD (in AIFF format, so the recorded sound was CD quality), in real time, which is very cool. (We used the aux output from our soundboard for the audio feed.) If you have a CD duplicator, you're ready to distribute copies of the sermon when church is over.

I would then open the resulting audio file(s) in Bias Peak (http://www.bias-inc.com) at home on my Macintosh (from the CD), convert it to mono, do some minor editing ? we met in the equivalent of a large living room, so coughing and joking during a sermon were clearly heard on the CD and needed deleting ? normalize it (a standard procedure of making audio as loud or almost as loud as it can be), and process it with a compressor plugin and a reverb plugin. Then I would use the free encoder for Real Player (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/basic.html) that Derek mentioned to make a RealAudio file to put on our website.

(The CD recorder automatically makes a new track when you pause it. So if the pastor stops to play a movie clip during the sermon, the audio for which would be illegal to include in your file, you can easily omit the movie by pausing the CD recorder. But you end up with two or more CD tracks that have to be appended to each other in an audio editing program.)

(If you record a sermon digitally, absolutely do not let the signal strength indicators on your level meter go into the red, ever. Going into the red zone occasionally is OK for analog recording, but a big no-no for digital recording.)

There's now a variety of similar CD recorders on the market, in the price range of $600 to $1000 or more. There are also portable CD recorders, for example, the Marantz CDR300, which sells for $700 in the music equipment catalog I have in front of me right now. But this price range is probably way more than most churches would be willing to pay to put their sermons online.

Portable MP3 recorders offer a lower cost solution for recording audio output from a mixing board. A list of such devices (possibly dated) is found at http://www.minidisc.org/uploader_table.html. Another option is a minidisc recorder (http://www.minidisc.org), although I think they're now overshadowed by MP3s.

However, MP3 is a lossy compression format. (See http://www.mp3developments.com/article4.php for a comparison of lossy vs. lossless codecs.) That means that sermons recorded straight to MP3 lose quality that you can never get back. That's why I would advocate recording to a lossless format such as AIFF (the original CD audio format) and WAV. I see, however, that Apple has a new lossless audio format for its iPod.

So an obvious solution is to leverage an existing computer to record the sermon in real time to the hard drive in AIFF or WAV format. In the church I served, we had neither the money for another computer to dedicate to capturing the audio of a sermon in real time, nor, just as importantly, the space for such a computer. The point of having a CD recorder was to enable me to take the recorded sermon home on CD and work on it on my home computer.

(Actually, for a few weeks I used software ? I think it was Goldwave [http://www.goldwave.com] ? to record sound to my PC laptop. But the laptop was several years old and didn't have the processing speed nor hard drive size I needed.)

Don't use the Audio In jack on your computer ? it will add noise to your audio. Instead, use a USB audio input device. Edirol Corporation (http://www.edirol.com/products/audio.html ? look at the products at the bottom of this page) and likely other companies sell devices for recording audio in 16-bit quality to your computer via the USB port. (Note that such devices may require second-generation USB2 capability.) MP3 recorders probably already have a USB port, so you wouldn't need a separate device.

What software will you use to record the audio in real time? This website, http://all-streaming-media.com, appears to have gathered together in one place a large variety of low-cost software solutions. Otherwise, do a search on Google for "record sound" (use the quote marks) and you'll get many hits for MP3 recorders and converters.

Churches with big budgets likely use ProTools (http://www.protools.com). Or you can use the audio editing software I mention below.

Once you've recorded the audio, you can edit it using inexpensive freeware or shareware audio editing software for Mac or PC. Check the shareware and software download sites such as http://www.tucows.com and http://www.shareware.com.

For more flexibility (but for more $$$), for the Macintosh, there's Bias Peak (mentioned above) and Spark (http://www.tcelectronic.com/SparkXL). For Windows users, there's Sony's (formerly Sonic Foundry's) Sound Forge (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=961). I mention these because they are leading products. There are undoubtedly many other perfectly suitable audio editing programs available for this purpose. (For editing sermons, you really don't need the power of a multi-track digital audio workstation software. You just need a two-track audio editing program.)

Many of these higher end audio editing software will include plugins to allow you to export files directly to Real or Windows audio formats. Otherwise, I already have mentioned above the free Real encoder. The free Windows Media encoder is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5691ba02-e496-465a-bba9-b2f1182cdf24&DisplayLang=en.

The Quicktime you already have on your computer contains many power audio and video editing and compression features. To avail yourself of these features, all you need to do is buy a license from Apple for $29.99 (see http://www.apple.com/quicktime/upgrade). You don't even have to download any software ? as stated, the features are already built-in to the Quicktime already installed on your computer. You just have to add the license key to the Quicktime preferences.

For more control over compression settings, consider the following dedicated compression tools:

Cleaner Pro (formerly Media Cleaner Pro and before that Movie Cleaner), the longtime industry standard for compressing audio and video files for CD-ROM, DVD and the web. See http://www.discreet.com/products/cleaner. For Macintosh or Windows.

Several programs in recent years now challenge Cleaner for the title of media compression king:

Sorenson Video's Squeeze (http://www.sorenson.com), which includes a version for streaming video in a Flash presentation. For Macintosh or Windows.

Popwire's Compression Master 3.0 (http://www.popwire.com). This was reviewed in a recent issue of DV magazine (http://www.dv.com/reviews; membership required to read actual review). Macintosh only.

Canopus's ProCoder 2.0 (see http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ProCoder2/pm_procoder2.asp). Windows XP only.

OTHER RESOURCES:

DV magazine, mentioned above. Includes occasional reviews of compression software, and, about every year or year and a half, a roundup and evaluation of available codecs and streaming media players by Ben Waggoner (http://www.benwaggoner.com/interframe_aboutus.htm), a leading expert on compression and codecs.

http://www.streamingmedia.com. Website devoted to the subject.

http://www.sovrenti.com/smp.htm. This company sells a media player created using Macromedia Flash. I've seen it used on several church websites. (You could build your own media player using Flash, if you had the know-how.) Flash is ubiquitous, so you don't have to worry about whether the user has the Windows Media player or RealPlayer or Quicktime.

Finally, in my research, I've come across a few churches that make available video of sermons. This has some advantages, for example, you can see the pastor and setting in which he or she is delivering the sermon. The obvious disadvantage is the greatly increased file size and bandwidth requirements.

(Check out the streaming videos of Pastor Bill Purvis' sermons that are available on the message archive page [http://www.cascadehills.com/events/sermons.asp] of Cascade Hills Church of Columbus, Georgia. Each begins with an introduction that's an excellent example of motion graphics and equal in quality to anything you'd see on network TV. The messages themselves are a cut above the norm: This church is large enough to afford IMAG [broadcast-style] video cameras and video switchers, so you don't get just the talking head of the pastor delivering his sermon, but multi-angle shots as well as pans.)

But the idea of using sermon videos is probably not new to you folks. I mention it here to remind people that, by using such tools as Cleaner Pro, you can crop video to any rectangular shape you want, horizontal or vertical (I've yet to see a vertical video, however, but it's possible!). For videos to be watched on a computer, you are not stuck with the horizontal 4:3 aspect ratio of analog video (640x480 pixels is a 4:3 aspect ratio) that we are used to seeing only because that's the aspect ratio of television and projected slides.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[mrbelfry]

Wow - A wonderfully comprehensive reply from our host making my original reply seem woefully lame!

Just to reiterate what David said - be very careful when you are recording to not let the levels go into the read. This will really destroy the quality of the audio - I've lost many a good sermon that way!

I'd advise steering clear of minidisc as there are very few that allow you to easily transfer straight to PC (at least I couldn't find any when I was researching a couple of years ago).

Even though MP3 loses quality when you compress it I'm more than happy with the end result for the spoken word. I use an Archos (www.archos.com) Jukebox Recorder (which cost me ?100 from amazon). I dont think they make this anymore though! I use goldwave to edit. Another advantage of MP3 is that I can fit around 20 sermons on 1 CD for long term storage. When we used to record to tape I had several box fulls under my desk but storing on CD means I can have a whole years worth of sermons in a handy carry case.

Hope this is helpful

[iamcam]

Somebody back at the audio booth actually records the messages into a high-quality MP3, then a second person cuts that down to a low-quality VBR. We only include the message and none of the music, so the files come out to around 10MB each, give or take. They all get posted for download - no streaming required, which is nice b/c people like to burn them to CDs, iPods, or whatever.

[David Gillaspey]

Somebody back at the audio booth actually records the messages into a high-quality MP3, then a second person cuts that down to a low-quality VBR. We only include the message and none of the music, so the files come out to around 10MB each, give or take. They all get posted for download - no streaming required, which is nice b/c people like to burn them to CDs, iPods, or whatever.Going from MP3 to MP3, there probably isn't a need for recording the audio at CD or higher quality. (Contrary to what I wrote previously, thus I'm agreeing with you.) But if a church wanted to provide smaller files or streamable files, say for those with 56K dialup connections, it seems like one would want to record the sermon at CD or better quality, before compressing the file down. (Because in that case, a high degree of compression is required.)

This chart:
http://www.bwg.admin.ch/service/download/e/udloadz.htm

(the units appear to be minutes and decimal fractions of minutes, that is, 2.4 on the chart is 2.4 minutes)

and this online download time estimator:
http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/resources/download-calculator.html

both give a time of about 24 minutes, more or less, to download a 10M file on a 56K connection. I'm guessing anyone with a 56K dialup connection won't bother.

I took a look at some of the RealAudio files of sermons I made for the church I formerly served. The file sizes were 3MB to 4MB for 30 to 40 minute sermons. That still counts as pretty big files for someone on a 56K dialup, to be sure, but on the plus side the user could at least listen to the files as they downloaded. But then they couldn't be taken with you, as with MP3s.

The advantage of using dedicated compression software such as Cleaner Pro is that one can output files in multiple formats (Real, Windows Media and/or MP3) from the same source file, automatically. (Of course it takes a little while to do the extra format[s], but the trick is to let the computer work on them overnight.)

Given the availability of this feature, it seems like it would be helpful for churches to provide their messages in multiple formats.

(Switching subjects now.) Lots of churches make their sermons available online, which of course I support, but I wonder if anyone on the forum actually has statistics on how often people actually download these files from their church's website. I say this because, though most churches try to provide tapes or CDs of sermons for free or for a few bucks, my observation is that the percentage of people actually taking advantage of this is really really low. Wonder how it is for online messages?

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[David Gillaspey]

Just to reiterate what David said - be very careful when you are recording to not let the levels go into the read. This will really destroy the quality of the audio - I've lost many a good sermon that waylI couldn't remember the term when writing my previous post. It's a problem of distortion. Analog distortion is relatively tolerable (or desirable, for guitarists). Digital distortion is awful and cannot be fixed. So you need to keep your signals level well below the red zone when recording digitally.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[wbcderek]

It seems the more information I have, the more questions I have, and the more ideas that pop into my head :rolleyes:

First off I just have to say I'm blessed to be at a church that is willing to go with my ideas, see the benefit of them and support them.

Obviously from the posts and what I've seen on websites that there is alot more use of audio than video in the church website market. I still plan on adding streaming video but have to figure out exactly the best way to do that. Of course I'd like to have that ready for our pastor's next sermon series which begins the first weekend in May.

My new idea is adding our past sermons and creating a searchable topical database of these sermons and their sermon notes. Of course, (this is where I always ask the question) these are all on cassette tapes, have any of you successfully transferred your cassette ministry to digital files? And of course, what equipment did you find successful and best for this, and what is the time frame for this type of conversion. I'm sure their are cassette to CD recorders available out there, but is it better to convert to CD and then pull the files from the CD's or direct to the digital file?

Derek:confused:

[mrbelfry]

My new idea is adding our past sermons and creating a searchable topical database of these sermons and their sermon notes. Of course, (this is where I always ask the question) these are all on cassette tapes, have any of you successfully transferred your cassette ministry to digital files? And of course, what equipment did you find successful and best for this, and what is the time frame for this type of conversion. I'm sure their are cassette to CD recorders available out there, but is it better to convert to CD and then pull the files from the CD's or direct to the digital file?

I've been wanting to do this for years! I transferred the sermons we had on cassette by plugging a walkman into my soundcard and playing the sermons. I captured them using Goldwave which David mentioned above. I like to store them as MP3 so that I can have several sermons on 1 cd so I don't do direct to CD. This was a real pain though because I had to do it all real time! So if a sermon was 30 minutes it took me 30 minutes. If you are doing this don't forget to watch out for distortion.

[David Gillaspey]

Obviously from the posts and what I've seen on websites that there is a lot more use of audio than video in the church website market. ... have any of you successfully transferred your cassette ministry to digital files? ... I'm sure their are cassette to CD recorders available out there, but is it better to convert to CD and then pull the files from the CD's or direct to the digital file?Hi Derek,

It's relatively easy, for several reasons, to post audio of sermons on a website. But the main problem with putting video on a church website is file size and bandwidth: Video files are MUCH bigger than audio files, and require much more bandwidth to be streamed.

That means you need lots of storage space (on your web server). Until a few years ago, you'd typically pay US$20 or so a month and get a paltry few Mb of hard drive space. Now, for US$20 or so a month, your web hosting plan ought to provide as much as 1G, if not 2G to 4G of storage. (If not, it's time to switch web hosting companies. Today.)

Also, video requires your users to have fast internet connections, because much more data has to be streamed.

<< have any of you successfully transferred your cassette ministry to digital files? ... I'm sure their are cassette to CD recorders available out there, >>

Tape recordings are analog recordings. There is no way to convert from tape to digital recordings except put your audio tape in a cassette tape player (or Walkman, as MrBelfry does) and play the tape start to finish in real time.

That's why you may want to think twice about converting old sermons on tape to CDs or some other digital format. It will require a huge investment of your time. And as I pointed out in a previous post, my observation is that only a tiny percentage of people actually want sermon recordings.

But if you do decide to convert the taped sermons, I would still suggest purchasing a USB audio input to record the sound (from the tape player) into your computer. You'll get better quality sound than using the miniphone jack on the back of your computer.

I would suggest recording future sermons digitally, using any of the means I've mentioned or that others have mentioned. If you unable to do this, and must continue to record to tape, then here are two suggestions: Use high quality tape. And, keep the signal level as hot (loud) as possible. That means deliberately setting your signal levels so that you occasionally get flashes of red on your signal level meter. (Remember, you're making an analog recording here. As pointed out before, when making a digital recording, you avoid going into the red at all cost.)

When making a tape or analog recording, the reason you want to make the audio level as loud as possible is to keep the noise as low as possible. Whenever you record audio, you always get a tiny bit of "noise," too: ambient, background noise from the room (no room is absolutely silent); noise from the microphone and soundboard; noise from the tape itself; and noise from electrical circuits, e.g., 60 cycle AC hum. If you were to record the pastor's sermon at only a moderate level, then when you turn up the sound (later, when listening to it), guess what? You turn up the noise, too.

By recording the pastor's sermon as loud as possible, first of all, you probably won't have to turn up the sound later. In fact, you probably will turn the sound down, which will result in the noise being turned down, too.

Now the problem with making digital recordings is that you still have reasons to avoid noise, so you want the signal to be as loud as possible. BUT, you absolutely don't want the signal to go into the red. So you have to compromise by giving yourself lots of "headroom".

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[David Gillaspey]

My new idea is adding our past sermons and creating a searchable topical database of these sermons and their sermon notes.Hi again,

On my "Seen and noted" page,

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/seen_and_noted.php

under the topic "Message archives," you'll find a few examples of searchable message archives.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[zzyxxe]

My church records our Pastor's sermons each and makes them available on CD in the atrium. As webmaster, each week I pickup a CD, rip it to MP3 on my computer, then use RealProducer Basic (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/) to convert it into streaming Real Audio media. RealProducer Basic is free! You can encode up to three different bandwidth compression rates (different quality levels) for people with different internet connection speeds (i.e. encode for 28.8k dial-up users, 56k dialup users, and one for DSL users).
This way members can "stream" the sermon in near real time and not have wait for the whole audio file to download.

-Zzyxxe

[David Gillaspey]

This way members can "stream" the sermon in near real time and not have to wait for the whole audio file to download.I agree. That's why I prefer streamable RealAudio files. But then, I don't own an iPod.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[zzyxxe]

When I was looking for examples of sites that posted their sermons in RealAudio, I found and liked Beaverton Christian's website:

http://www.bccfamily.org/sermons/index.cfm

-Zzyxxe!

[David Gillaspey]

I found and liked Beaverton Christian's websiteI agree. The page is nicely laid out, and the files do sound pretty good.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[generalhavok]

Wow. You guys make it sound really, really complicated...which is why I've never tried to do audio. One of my clients sends me a disc every once in a while to rip and upload for him, and I use MusicMatch JukeBox (it's just what I have available) to make mp3's and Windows Media files. That's the extent of my audio experience.

[David Gillaspey]

Wow. You guys make it sound really, really complicatedI think making RealAudio files (for example) and putting them on a website probably is a little more complicated than making MP3s.

RealAudio files will be smaller than corresponding MP3 files, because of higher compression ratios. That means the source audio must be better quality to begin with, to achieve good results. (When I say that, I'm talking about making good quality, highly compressed files that will be streamable even for dialup users. It's easier to make good quality files for broadband users.) Thus my description of a long, complicated process to create good quality RealAudio files that will be playable even for 56K users. But, as you can see from other forum members' posts, the process need not always be so complicated.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[wbcderek]

Hi all,

An update and a hello from someone who has been gone awhile. Well when I started this thread we had neither streaming audio or video on our site. We now have both, and will start this weekend with recording our sermons digitally instead of to cassette as we have in the past.

For our audio recording we are using a $100 512MB Samsung MP3 player that has an input that encodes to MP3. For editing I'm using a free program called Audacity that works great lets listen, cut, paste, noise reduction, and probably another dozen special effects. For our encoding we are using the free Windows Media encoder and free Real Producer encoder.

For video we are currently recording to VHS, and using DVDxpress that we picked up at Walmart for $80 that allows you to hook the 3 RCA cables to your computer by USB, plus all the capturing and editing software. That will allow you to save as VCD or a DVD, and then encode from there. We will soon be getting a DVD recorder that we can pick up for about $170. We've also added two video switches for smooth transitions from cameras, DVD, VCR, Powerpoint, MediaShout, etc.

To make the audio and video sermons learner friendly we are also adding a PDF of the sermon notes for download. This was done with another free program called PDF995, which lets you convert to PDF anything you would be able to print.

Hopes this helps if any questions or comments please let me know.

[David Gillaspey]

Thanks, Derek, for the update.

For the benefit of all, here are URLS for two of the products Derek mentioned. (Not trying to upstage you, Derek ? I just like provide resources for people.)

MediaShout
One of number of excellent programs for projecting lyrics, sermon notes, etc., during services, all of which are designed to replace PowerPoint.
http://www.mediashout.com

pdf995
One of a suite of free products for creating and manipulating pdfs. Windows only. This is adware, which means you see an ad each time you use the product, unless you pay a small fee for a license key.
http://www.pdf995.com/

Mac OSX (which I use, though I also have a PC) has pdf creation ability built-in (you print to a pdf, as with pdf995). What I don't have is the ability to combine pdfs into a single document, add bookmarks, etc. Anyone know of a free or low-cost tool for this?

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[iamcam]

We use MediaShout during our gatherings (i.e. services) with great success. It has been a great way to combine media during worship, announcements, etc.

I can't think of the name off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure there's a Mac OS X utility you can download to form several PDF files into one multi-page document. A good source for mac software downloads is VersionTracker: http://www.versiontracker.com/ (also available for Windows and PalmOS). Might as well start there.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Nina,

I don't currently work hands-on with the Tascam unit, because my wife and I left our former church (due to our re-location across town) some time ago. However, it's really a great unit.

To answer your question, I scanned through the user manual (available in pdf form from the Tascam website (http://www.tascam.com/Products/CC-222.html)). There is no indication that what you want to do ? high-speed dubbing from tape to CD ? can be done with this unit. (Real time dubbing is possible, though.) I'm not even sure it's possible to do such a thing, given that two wholly different media formats are involved.

You may need to have it done for you at a "standards conversion" company These are companies that, for example, convert one video or audio format to another. I can help you locate such a company.

But if you plan on editing the sermons at all, or making MP3s, it takes a while even with a fast computer to open an audio file from a CD into an audio-editing program. (I know from experience.) A better plan may be to have a standards-conversion company convert the files to audio .aif or .wav files for you (foregoing, initially, the burning of CDs) and then use a high-capacity storage device to get the files to you. Such a company would undoubtedly also be able to convert the sermons to MP3 for you, if you desire that.

The reason a standards conversion company can do this for you is they would have banks of tape players, so as to be able to convert many tapes at once to sound files, though in real time.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites