Upgrading Equipment on Saturday 3/31

The heart of our broadcast system on Channel 20 is a Leightronix NEXUS.  It had started to show signs of failure (which require a trip to Town Hall at odd hours to reboot it).  We will be replacing it with an UltraNEXUS on Saturday 3/31.  While it’s powered off to be swapped out, Channel 20 will go dark, starting at approximately 11AM.

The UltraNEXUS will allow us to do on-demand streaming video straight from our archives, replacing the Vimeo streaming solution that has given us problems over the last 6 months or so.

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Streaming (Vimeo) replays experiencing technical difficulties

For the last several months, we’ve had a series of technical problems with the getting Selectmen and Planning meetings uploaded to Vimeo.  We are looking at alternative solutions, as well as trying to identify the source of the problem.  We intend to resume streaming replays of these public meetings as soon as we can.

Selectmen 5/9 Meeting delayed posting on Vimeo

The 5/9 Selectmen’s meeting is ready to be posted on Vimeo, but we have a limit on the number of GB we can upload in a week, and it’s too big to fit after getting the last Planning Board meeting up.  So it’s going to sit and wait until our upload quota resets early next week, and then it will go up.

We keep the latest two meetings on the Amherst NH Board of Selectmen channel.

Planning Board added to Vimeo account

We’ve added an Amherst NH Planning Board channel to Vimeo, and started loading meetings there.  We’ll keep the last two meetings up.

Converting the recording and uploading it to Vimeo takes 24-48 hours, depending on volunteer availability, size of the video file, and whether or  not there are errors in the conversion process or upload.  The last meeting, for example, was a 7 GB raw video file, which converted down to 3.2 GB, and then had to be uploaded to Vimeo… and the upload failed the first time.  Each conversion attempt takes 2-5 hours, and each upload attempt also takes 3-5 hours.  And, of course, we’re not staring at the screen watching progress bars while it happens, so if there’s an error it may take a while before we retry.

Streaming the Selectmen

We’re experimenting with making meetings we broadcast available for internet users with streaming.  Not live… after the fact.  We’ve set up an account on Vimeo and created the Selectmen channel.  Last night’s meeting (3/14) is up and it looks pretty good.   For the time being we’ll stick with the Selectmen meetings; once we get good at it we can look at Planning Board and perhaps even ZBA meetings.

All our content will be here: www.vimeo.com/actv20