Tutorial: Dual-Stream, Multi-Destination Live Delivery with the Matrox Monarch LCS

Video Presentation Options

As mentioned earlier, you're not limited to only one video feed at a time. You can set the Monarch to encode a side-by-side or a picture-in-picture of both feeds simultaneously.

To really show you what the Monarch can do, I installed it in a local church to demo its capabilities. One Life Church already has a great video production system. But the Monarch still added some additional features they were missing. They had the age-old conundrum that anyone capturing sermons faces. Do we show the presentation slide or the speaker?

Using the Monarch, they didn't have to choose. We set the device to take both inputs and create a side-by-side video showing both inputs to the viewer simultaneously. We enabled the cropping during configuration (Figure 6, below).

Figure 6. Configuring picture-by-picture. Click the image to see it at full size.

Without cropping, the result is a 50/50 split between the two sources. With cropping enabled, it's closer to a 30/70 split (Figure 7, below). So the computer presentation slides providing the messaging can have more screen space while the speaker can still be clearly seen.

Figure 7. Side-by-side, 30/70 speaker/slides. Click the image to see it at full size.

Now the stream to their shut-ins and traveling families can feel closer to really being in the auditorium with the rest of the congregation.

Streaming to Multiple Destinations

Even though One Life Church uses a custom CDN to stream, the Monarch is compatible with dedicated house of worship streaming services, such as lifestream.tv, Sunday Streams, streamingchurch.tv, and worship channels.

You can also set the Monarch LCS to stream to any of the most popular online destinations like YouTube and Facebook. With a powerful H.264 dual-encoding engine, you can target two live platforms simultaneously at a high-quality 1080p30 (Figure 8, below).

Figure 8. Stream live to 2 popular destinations simultaneously. Click the image to see it at full size.

Streaming and recording your sermons reaches audiences that can't attend in person. And it also doesn't exclude those that need to watch at a later date. The recordings can either be stored locally on an SD card, USB drive, or target a shared network folder (Figure 9, below). The recorded content can then be edited to deliver weekly lessons online or uploaded at a higher master quality when upload bandwidth speeds dictate the quality you can deliver live--both without the need for transcoding.

Figure 9. Record to an SD card, external USB drive, or shared network folder. Click the image to see it at full size.

Whether you want to rack-mount a unit in a studio or tuck it under a lectern, or you need multi-destination simultaneous streaming, the Monarch LCS from Matrox is a robust, flexible, and simple streaming appliance suitable for any application.