Good Hello Slippers!
The new Frankie encoders have been having problems with 1080p video which was the only fairly untested feature that was added earlier this week. As the Friday and Saturday are by far our busyest time, we decided to push a quick unannounced emergency update to all streamers earlier today.
The upgrade went well, it lasted only ~15 seconds and it also seems to have fixed at least part of the issues some DJs were experiencing.
Doublecheck your stream settings
Please understand that Frankie behaves very differently to the super generic streamers that most other sites (and especially sites like FB and YT) use. Those generic streamers are somewhat flexible on the incoming stream and handle issues behind the scenes. Frankie is much simpler: you give it shit (= something other than exactly what it expects) and it outputs shit. But when your stream has the right settings, it works very, very well.
(Note that this is not going to change anytime soon either. Big streaming companies have literally teams of highly paid engineers working on their solutions full-time. We, well, don’t.)
New Pro Settings in a nutshell
- Video 720p @ 3500 kbps or 1080p @ 5000 kbps
- Very important: do not send bitrates over 5M or it will choke not only your instance but all other instances as well! Using 720p @ 3500 kbps is recommended.
- Audio 320 AAC @ 44100
- Note that whatever video you send and whatever version the listener listens to, the audio is exactly the same for all formats.
- Framerate: 30
- Keyframe every 2s
We have some tools we can use to eventually block any DJ sending badly formatted stream but for now the whole community relies on you to make sure that your settings are exactly right.