So no need to try the C2 then? Thanks for sharing!
I actually do think the C2 is probably still the way to go since weāre starting to see used and refurbished units hit the market. Everything Iāve read says theyāre basically bulletproof. I think the value is there if you go for the 2TX/1RX setup.
Hereās 20 minutes of buttery smooth C1 footage from last night.
Even as good as this is, if the C2 is twice as reliable, 3x the distance, and just as easy to setup like they say, itās going to make a wireless setup very stable and reasonably affordable and take pinball streaming production levels to darn near professional quality.
With the C1, Iāve gone from āHow many frames am I going to skip in this broadcast?ā to āDid that just skip a frame?ā Sometimes itās hard to tell and I really look for them. Just smooth motion 99.9% of the time now.
1 Like
If you approve of these, Iāll know Iām good. I still never saw the additional issues you saw with running 3 accusoons, but Iām getting to the point Iād like to at least level up the playfield transmitter.
This has been determined earlier in this thread. I had to do this Lynnās to get rid of all the stutter, maybe 18-20" apart. WiFi enthusiast will also tell you that the antennas should be angled 45Ā° for optimal signal. I think it applies to one of the bands only though.
I wonder if Accsoon would be open to some feedback here? The rubberband effects exacerbates the visual artifact more than just having a frame frozen and immediately skip to the correct timecode once the buffer is being populated consistently.
Hereās an exaggerated example of what I mean. Iām not picking on these guys. I just happened to notice it when when I tuned into their stream the other night. Believe me, I understand their plight.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2622214106?t=02h13m00s
Notice how the ball ājumpsā from one position on the playfield to the next and the motion is very herky-jerky? Compare that to the smooth-motion video I posted recently where itās buttery smooth.
The problem with the Accsoons is, even in the absolute best conditions, about once per second they make a small little jerking motion. Take a look at some Accsoon footage and wait til the ball travels slowly, like up an inlane on a catch, and you can see it just looks like the picture twitches, freezes for just a second, then attempts to catch back up to real time. Not really a big deal for things like the player or display cameras, but very distracting on the playfield. This sounds like nitpicking, but rarely are the conditions so good that the motion approaches a full 60 frames per second on those units. Again, perfectly fine for the non-playfield cameras.
Under signal conditions like the video above, which is more often than not (though not usually this extreme), you get motion that looks like very disjointed and hard for the eye to follow because the ball ājumpsā around at random frame intervals. Iāve found the Accsoons perform okay in controlled environments, but when you get 30 people in your basement or arcade and they all have a phone, or when you go to somewhere new and youāre not sure where the optimal setup is, they perform quite poorly. Even when the conditions are optimal, they still freeze a little. Basically, perfect performance doesnāt exist, and when the conditions are less than perfect, they suffer even worse frame drops than whatās acceptable for a playfield IMHO.
So what are you really buying when you upgrade?
Flexibility - with a C1 or C2, you can show up pretty much anywhere and not have to worry about there being a couple of walls between you and the games, giving you way more options about where to put your booth. The signal cuts through crowds and phones easily, and if the signal gets messy, will seamlessly jump frequencies until it finds the best one for the environment. Itās more of a surgical approach than a āspray and prayā.
Performance - Not only does a perfect 60fps exist, itās pretty easy to achieve, providing smooth motion for the ball as long as you allow enough space from your other receivers somewhat isolate the signal. In an environment where the Accsoons would be struggling, these things have no problem maintaining wireless delivery of frame-perfect playfield action.
This exactly. They need to update the firmware so at least it will behave like the Cosmos and the motion of the ball carries through like you described. Even the higher-end Accsoon units do the jumpy motion, just less often.
I think what happened is that Hollyland figured out people want to use this technology for live production rather than monitoring on a film set, which is where the market really started. They really put all their eggs into the āsignal stabilityā basket for this reason and it has really paid off. Iāll eventually move to a C2/C1 setup and never really have to worry about signal conditions ever again. Makes my life easier, makes the broadcast better for the viewer, and means our tournament archive will be a pleasant experience to watch 20 years from now when Iām reminiscing.
Does anyone have any experience with the Sony HDR-CX440 camera? I picked one up cheap & Iām wondering if Iāll get similar results to HDR-CX405. Iād like to use it for my playfield camera (currently using Mevos). I seem to recall someone saying most of HDR-CX series will work well for streaming, but I canāt remember where I saw that.
My whiteboard is broken. Deleted my old lua script and reloaded a fresh one I downloaded from OBS. Still no joy. Couple pics. One shows the script and settings and the other is showing my whiteboard source with red font. Not sure if that means itās broken, but when I do a projector window, I canāt write. Any help?
I wasnāt able to get this to work, but the draw dock plugin is working well. Went with that.
I had this problem back in August. Replaced it with this and everythingās been fine.
1 Like
Did anyone ever try one of these out? Theyāre claiming 1.5 miles range on 4k transmission. At $800 + a 4k multiviewer, this would seem high-quality/cost-effective solution.
Indeed it seems. At a meager 12Mbit/s H.265 the results are not ideal. The Accsoonās frame skip is also there.
Iāve done a bunch of testing here and there that Iāve published.
CineMaster 4K h.264 vs h.265:
Comparing 1080p60 wireless streaming with a multiviewer (long live the monoprice!):
These are great! Thanks!
Since weāre currently using 3 CineView HEās that already have all the issues of the CineMaster, it still feels like 1 CineMaster + a multiviewer would be a pure upgrade from what we have. Am I misreading the information?
Thanks for watching. Like Iāve said before, I think the CineView HEs are in the single digit Mbitās, probably 4-6Mbit, very similar encoding you do from OBS to Twitch. The double-encoding becomes very apparent and the final render that your viewers watch lack a lot of detail and looks washed out. The encoders are great these days to āhideā compression artifacts by simply smoothing them out.
Iām not using my CineMaster 4K for anything but on location unboxing streams at the moment and I would not use it for tournament streaming because of the random stutter.
The quality you get from a single blackbird and a 1080p60 multiviewer looks way better in the final render/production than using a CineMaster 4K with a 4K multiviewer, which is really sad. The blackbird is uncompressed but of course suffers when something is obstructing the line of sight.
If youāre having issues with the CineView HEās, mount them at least 2ā apart, that includes both ends (rig and station), and have them tilted at 45 degrees. If youāre still seeing issues I would hardcode the frequencies and ensure they donāt overlap with on location WiFi (I use an app called WiFiAnalyzer on Android, green WiFi symbol icon in the Google Play store).
All things considered, I donāt think youāll see any significant improvement with a single CineMaster 4K from a quality standpoint but youāll have a much easier time with signal stability if youāre in a noisy area as it has an additional frequency band.
I didnāt really want to discuss the quality of the HEās. Theyāre what we use for streaming now and maybe the quality isnāt perfect but theyāre robust. We stream in a lot of different locations and distance (through walls) and interference are two of our biggest challenges. The HEās handle those better than anything on the market except for maybe Hollyland and Iām not in the market to spend the money required for those.
We donāt have any problems with our HEās; itās just that it looks like the Master might give us more distance, more interference management, have equal or better picture quality, and simplify the technology footprint to boot, all for a few hundred dollars.
If this is the main driver, you will have a simpler setup, the quality will most likely be adequate in most situations.
Iām no WiFi expert but from what I can gather, 2.4Ghz is what penetrates walls, 5 and 6GHz has better performance, shorter range and less susceptible to interference due to lesser WiFi devices uses those bands. So, I guess having one TX/RX pair will improve the āair qualityā as you only have one device to worry about.
Another benefit a single device brings is that itās simpler to wire up the receiver to be more mobile. Get a 50ft HDMI cable and place the receiver where itās most strategic and less prone to interference. The ārigā can be a simple tripod on wheels with a 1/4"-20 extension rod.
Order everything off Amazon and send it back if it doesnāt work out.