Portable Streaming Encoders Shrink and Grow

Initial Setup

Given that it’s still early days for a number of these portable encoders, it wasn’t surprising that ways to perform initial setup varied greatly between devices.

We found as many ways to do initial setup as there were devices. Since many of these devices are headless—all of the units we reviewed, with the exception of the Osprey Talon G1’s more expensive variant, the Talon G2, and the Epiphan Webcaster X2, lacked even a basic single-line screen—every company approaches initial device setup differently. The actions ranged from inserting a thumb drive to downloading an app.

While the Osprey Talon G2 has an integrated touchscreen, the Osprey Talon G1 (Figure 4, below) takes a different approach to connectivity. Since the G1 is headless, the unit will write a file with IP info to a thumb drive that’s inserted into the Talon’s USB port. This is helpful for those who aren’t using a Windows-based computer, as the Talon’s app is a standard Windows executable.

Figure 4. The Osprey Talon G1

The T-21 uses a Chrome app, meaning that it works within the Chrome browser (Figure 5, below). The Epiphan Webcaster X2, a device with a single LCD screen of approximately 20 characters or symbols, can be set up using an HDMI monitor and mouse. Once the unit is set up, the Webcaster X2 has a multipurpose button that allows users to toggle between two services—Facebook or YouTube—and then start and stop streaming with the same button.

Figure 5. The T-21 Monitor Chrome app

The tiniest unit that we reviewed, the Magewell Ultra Stream, has two physical buttons—one to start or stop live streams and one to start or stop recording—but requires a smartphone app for initial setup.

The Magewell app (Figure 6, below), which can be downloaded from the Apple iOS or Google Play app stores, is fairly clever, offering a zero configuration setup via Bluetooth. If your Bluetooth happens not to be turned on, the app will prompt turning on Bluetooth but will not show any available Ultra Stream devices until you return to the app itself (Bluetooth system settings may show other available devices but not Ultra Stream devices).

Figure 6. Configuring streaming setup with the Magewell app

Both the T-21 and Talon units also offer zero-configuration setups via a combination of their respective apps and the industry-standard Bonjour protocol.

Free but Inaccessible: Portable Encoders and Venue Internet Connections

One area where we at Streaming Media consistently see room for improvement is enhanced browser access. It’s not just enough to throw a browser into these portable encoders and expect that a single-tab approach to browsing will address the overall needs of portable streaming producers.

An example of what we mean by “enhanced browsing” can be tested out at your local Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Walmart. All of these retail establishments allow customers to access complimentary internet services. Yet each of these also requires a simple checkbox or button click to acknowledge that the customer will follow the (often unread) terms and conditions associated with the retailer’s free internet access. That simple checkbox confounds many portable streaming encoders, which are based on simple single-tab browsers.

This should not be an issue in 2018, since modern browsers and operating systems (such as Safari on a Mac or Edge on a Windows laptop) offer an easy way to get online. Once the appropriate Wi-Fi network is chosen, these modern operating systems prompt us with a mid-screen popup to acknowledge the terms and conditions and rapidly get online.

Most tablets do this, too, and some smartphones also offer this feature. It's certainly not foolproof, especially if the customer happens to try to access a secure HTTP website (designated by https:// or a padlock symbol in the browser address bar). In this case, the Wi-Fi symbol will appears but no access will be granted until the customer launches another browser tab, chooses a non-https website (e.g., www.espn.com), and then responds to the generated terms-and-conditions acceptance page.

We saw this issue firsthand on a recent production shoot at Streaming Media East. Regardless of whether we used the preset Wi-Fi or the integrated Ethernet connector, the two portable encoders we used would register that internet was present, but would refuse to stream.

Even after we updated the firmware, the action to find the simple “click to accept” was two levels down in the settings, which the average user wouldn't be trained to find. Steve Nathans-Kelly wrote this up in detail at go2sm.com/x2, and the company has a work-around, but it requires the use of at least a monitor and mouse (keyboard is optional), which makes the portable system much less portable.

The company, Epiphan, has since blocked its Webcaster X2 from appearing to be connected to a network on what it labels a “captive” Wi-Fi network.

“If you’ve selected a captive Wi-Fi network in the Settings but are not yet logged in, Webcaster X2 does not display a pairing code on the front screen display,” the company writes on its support site, “or when the pairing code icon is selected from the main page using a connected HDMI display and mouse. For a pairing code to be generated when a captive Wi-Fi network is selected in the Settings, you must be logged in to the captive network.” (go2sm.com/captive)

When asked whether he’d run into similar issues to the one I described above, Mark East said he's “absolutely” seen them.

“These are two of, like, six small-form-factor encoders that we’ve been looking at lately,” says East, “and the commonality with every single one of this is UI [user interface] and UX [user experience] integration with platforms. They all try to integrate with YouTube, Facebook, and some of them Twitch, etc.”

Each of the SFFE units we looked at try to integrate with at least one of these, but not all implementations are equally successful.

“They’ll try to use the API [application programming interface] to log in, create the event, start and stop the event, that sort of thing,” says East. “But that integration is always pretty weak. So we end up not using it at all, we just spit out RTMP to an entry point somewhere.”