The settings listed below are general guidelines based on our experience working with church services. Optimal encoding settings depend on your source video quality, the amount of motion in your recording and the capabilities of your viewing audience.

Multirate streaming provides the best results for simulated live and on demand videos. You provide a master or near master quality file which we then re-encode into multiple formats. This is triggered automatically when you upload any file with a bit rate of 2500k or higher. Although we accept almost any format for this, we recommend the following:

File Format: MP4 / MOV Video Codec: h.264 Main Profile Audio Codec: AAC Audio Channels: 1 (Mono) Audio bit rate: 48-64k

* Estimated file size for a 1 hour video

In most cases, we will re-encode your source video for mobile streaming (requires a Plus or higher account).

In most circumstances, we recommend matching the size you plan on embedding the live stream on your page, with a recommended maximum of 640×480 for desktop and 320×240 for mobile. If you are using the live stream for multi-site or know your audiences systems can support it you can normally run a live stream up to 2000kbits/second before special provisions need to be made to deal with very high bit rate streams.

Church Online uses a embed size of 480×270 for 16:9 and 480×360 for 4:3. We recommend running two streams. One at the embed size, and one at 4x the embed size. Keeping an even multiple of the width and height prevents scaling artifacts.