A First Look at Zaplive Free Publisher

Shortly after installing my new version of Windows 7 Professional, I decided to take a look at the Zaplive.TV free publisher program. Hancock Wildlife Foundation has been using Zaplive's distribution via an agreement with WildEarth.TV for over a year now, but we've pretty much been doing straight Adobe media encoder live streams.

Now we're gearing up to do some live annotations by David Hancock of not only our regular streams, but of other streams as well, including some generated at the Hancock Ranch in South Surrey, near Vancouver.

We're likely to go with VidBlaster's offering since we're going to be using multiple cameras and sources, but I wanted to take a look to see how close the various offerings are to Vidblaster in terms of features and quality options. At this time I'm comparing free to free - since I'm using the Vidblaster demo which puts their logo in the upper right corner of the outbound stream.

The first thing I note is that they offer their plugin in two flavors: Firefox/Mozilla and Internet Explorer (IE)

I'll install the Firefox one first. The first thing I note is that much of the prompting is in German - although using the "cast out the vowels" method I can pretty much determine what they're saying. The plugin downloaded and Firefox asked if I really wanted to install it - I clicked "Allow" and it installed. Now it wants me to restart Firefox. Fortunately I'm documenting this with Google Chrome's browser so won't have to save and close.

After filling in a picture snapped from my Axis 206 Network Camera, I was directed to the Studio - and told a window would open. It didn't - turns out Firefox had "prevented this site from opening a pop-up window"  Love that program :)

I allowed Zaplive.TV to open popups - then had to "Click here" to get the studio to open.

Now the Adobe Flash Player Settings popup comes up, and I have to allow it to gain access to the camera. This protects you from someone having a web page that loads a flash script that turns your camera and microphone on when you are not expecting it. Another good reason for "video mute" (a cover over the lens) as well as audio mute (a switch on the mic). If you click on "remember" then you won't be asked again - but I strongly suggest you don't (ever) click this button as it defeats the whole purpose of the popup.

One thing I'll note here is that so far I have not been able to give my broadcast a title other than my account name. I'll continue looking, but it does not seem hopeful at this point. On other sites you'll find me as "TheDigitalRag" or "the-digital-rag" - but here I'm "richardpitt".

Anyway - after changing one setting - selecting the microphone channel on my Windows machine instead of the built-in microphone on the Sony handycam - I'm off to the races.

The standard setup is 320x240 pixels - which is pretty much equivalent to your standard analog TV in terms of real definition. Zaplive also choose 15 frames/second as their default, which allows most recent PCs to encode with lots of CPU left over. If you have a CPU that is less than 2 GHz, you might want to crank this down to 10 fps - but you should test.

Today we're running on a dual-core Intel Core-duo 2.33 GHz with 4 Gigs of RAM. I keep an eye on the task manager's performance graph - and in this case we hardly ever reach 50% on both CPUs - and then only if I'm moving windows around.

I also did a test at 25 fps - the highest you can go, and at 720x576 pixels - the highest 4:3 ratio setting in the studio software. I have a "Shaw Extreme" cable internet feed that gives me 10 Mbps down and 1Mbps up - and as you can see by the image to the right - I was getting 993Kbps at the time. Zaplive added caps the outbound link at 406Kbps, made up of whatever you set the video and audio rates at. If you max the video and lower the audio you'll get 395Kbps for video and 11Kbps for audio. If you try to max the audio and leave the video at max, the video rate will go down to 318Kbps if you push the audio to 88Kbps.

Increasing the frame rate pushed the CPU use up - almost double at 25fps what it was at 15fps. If your CPU is old and slow, you'll probably not get 25fps. Same thing in pushing the resolution up, and with both resolution and frame rate pushed to their max, my 2 CPUs were pushing 75-80% use. I have to say that at all times the actual output I was looking at on my other monitor, received from Zaplive's output - was excellent. No hesitations, no blockyness - just great video.