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Streaming a conference over YouTube

Pexip Infinity can output a dedicated RTMP multimedia stream to enterprise CDN (Content Delivery Network) streaming and recording services such as Wowza, Adobe, VBrick, Abiliteam, Qumu and Azure Media Services, and to public streaming services such as YouTube. Any Pexip conference can be streamed as a live event to an unlimited number of viewers, and can automatically be recorded and stored for later consumption.

If your conference contains presentation content, you have the option of setting up dual streams so that you can output the main video and presentation content channels separately. This means that viewers can simultaneously access the main video stream of the participants and a separate presentation content stream.

The administrator or meeting Host has to decide whether to set up the conference with a single RTMP stream or with dual RTMP streams.

When a conference is single streamed:

  • Viewers are automatically switched between the main video stream and the presentation stream whenever someone is presenting.
  • When someone is presenting, the video stream of the active speaker is shown in a small window in the upper right corner of the presentation.
  • The same single stream (with automatic switching between main video and presentation streams) can be made available later as a recording.

When a conference is dual streamed:

  • Viewers have to manually switch between the main video stream and the presentation stream, according to their preference. (However, viewers could optionally view the streams in two separate windows — one window showing the main video stream and the other window showing the presentation stream.)
  • The main video stream is not embedded as a small window within the presentation stream.
  • If nobody is currently presenting, Pexip Infinity sends a placeholder image on the presentation stream.
  • If the event is made available later as a recording, it can only be played back as two completely separate streams. There is no synchronization between the streams.

Note that your firewall needs to allow outbound traffic from the Conferencing Node to TCP port 1935 on the RTMP streaming server.

This guide explains how an administrator or meeting Host can stream a Pexip conference over YouTube.

YouTube prerequisites

Before the administrator or meeting Host can obtain an RTMP streaming URL from YouTube, they must ensure that they have a verified YouTube account, and that the account is enabled for live events.

  1. From your YouTube account settings page, select View additional features (www.youtube.com/features).
  2. If your Account status is not verified, select Verify and follow the YouTube instructions.
  3. If Live events is not enabled, click Enable.

Setting up streaming

To stream a conference you must assign a live streaming URL via YouTube, and then add it as a participant in your Pexip conference. There are two ways in which you can obtain an RTMP streaming URL from YouTube:

  • Use Pexip's own service at http://youtube.pexip.com. This method simplifies the generation process and automatically uses the appropriate settings. However, it is only suitable if you want to set up a single stream.
  • Generate your URL directly from within your YouTube account at www.youtube.com/my_live_events. You must use this method if you want to set up dual streams within the same broadcast (i.e. a "second camera" in YouTube terms).

    When generating a URL directly from within YouTube, the Privacy setting is Public by default, so we recommend that you change this to Unlisted.

Note that the live stream will have a 20-30 second delay. This is because YouTube buffers the stream so that it can tolerate brief connection losses and to ensure a good consistent experience. This is standard streaming behavior.

The appropriate procedures for adding single or dual-streamed participants to your conference are described below.