This decides what the rest of the settings need to be set at, and there are a host of questions to ask yourself and your ministry about which one will serve your ministry best!:

Bit rate is the amount of data being sent per second, and contains all the information of your stream, from frames to audio to the settings being used. In this case, bitrate is measuring the amount of data being sent from your encoder to Subsplash Live.

High bitrates can increase the quality of the picture, but can also increase the likelihood of a disconnect. These kinds of disconnections can happen at the local network level, as the network may not be able to handle the higher data rates, and can happen at the server level if there is too much data to parse through and process.

Higher bitrates can also make the stream harder to play on your end-users’ networks, as they might not be able to handle the incoming data, resulting in skips and buffering.

It is important to find the middle ground here in quality and ease of playback; this is why our recommended encoding settings are set the way they are!

These are the ways in which your encoder is compressing and decompressing the stream; this tells your encoder how to compress the file, and tells devices how to decompress the file. These settings are important because they can make the decompression process take longer or fail, especially on older mobile devices. Usually, each Level is designed to be used for a specific resolution. In our case, Level 3.1 is mainly used for 720p streams and Level 4.0 is mainly used for 1080p streams. While a higher Level may give the impression that quality will be better, it will actually impact the playback and reliability of the stream.

This is how many frames are being sent per second in the stream. Over the last couple of years, the ideas of what the “standard” is for frame rates have tried to shift. While most TV stations and streamers regularly use 30 FPS (in specific, 29.97 FPS), there has been a movement to shift churches to 60 FPS streams.

This is done less to improve the quality of a stream, but more to sell “higher-end” gear to churches. Currently, 30 FPS is the industry standard for most visual media, for several reasons, such as the amount of storage needed, the realism of the picture, and added processing and editing times.

That being said, we highly encourage and recommend using 30 FPS as your Frame Rate.

The biggest issue that comes with higher frame rates is that the bitrates needed are much higher, and if not set correctly, can harm the resilience of your stream, while also impacting the quality of each frame. If the bitrates and frame rates do not match what is needed, each frame will have less than the needed data to properly translate the full quality of the stream.

Say, for instance, you are streaming with a 4000 Kbps Bitrate for a 1080p60FPS stream. Each frame will be divvying up that data, but that bitrate is intended for 30 FPS streams! There are twice as many frames sharing the same amount of data, which will cause the frames to look much worse than intended.

(Note that at this time Subsplash Live does not support 60 FPS streams or the bitrates to support them. While they may work sometimes, if you run into any issues, this may be the first thing we will ask you to change.)

Another big piece of the streaming puzzle is the internet network that is handling the stream, and the networks that your congregation is using to watch the stream on. As we previously discussed, the bitrate selection can affect the reliability of your network, and how the stream plays back. See this article on some basic networking troubleshooting to help set your stream up for as much success on the network level as possible!