With so many churches looking to live stream their services, one important question always comes up.
What software do we need to live stream?
In the live streaming world there are two applications that dominate this corner of the market: Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder and Telestream’s Wirecast.
Lets compare these applications across four factors:
Wirecast vs FMLE
1. Cost
For some the price tag between these two programs is enough to make a decision. Touting a hefty $995 for the Pro version of Wirecast this application is expensive compared to its rival. Wirecast does offer a somewhat striped down version of their streaming production software for $495, but that’s still quite a bit more than FMLE, which by the way is a free program offered by Adobe.
2. Features
So what makes Wirecast so special to charge so much for something Adobe gives away for free? Wirecast is more than just a live encoder. It’s an actual video production switcher in software form. With Wirecast you have the option to fade between multiple camera angles, overlay text or graphics, and you can output to multiple bandwidths simultaneously.
Flash Media Live Encoder is simply just an encoder. While you do have the ability to push a stream and save to disk simultaneously, there aren’t many other great features. But hey, its FREE!
3. Efficiency
FMLE is an extremely resource hungry application. Once FMLE has maxed out your computer’s resources strange things start happening to your feed. Often times the audio will lose sync with the video, or your video will take forever to buffer. Wirecast has a much greater tolerance for average computers and handles resources in a more efficient way. As long as your pipe to the net is big enough, Wirecast can push your content through no problem.
4. User Interface
Even though Wirecast offers a ton more features, its extremely well designed. Training volunteers on the various settings and controls has been quite easy. Flash Media Live Encoder is designed for the technically inclined. While settings can be saved and recalled easily, FMLE offers quite a bit of control over your outgoing media. This is a good thing for those of us who have changing specific needs, but its overkill to the everyday church volunteer.
Often times live streaming can be an after thought with today’s technology. When you’re just trying to slap something together for the sake of seeing how it works, Flash Media Live Encoder does a great job. But when live streaming is a part of the master plan and can be budgeted for, Wirecast is the application you’ll want to look more into.
Have you used either of these applications?
What has your experience been like?
Willie says
Your comparing different things…
One is designed to do nothing but stream the other is a “production suite.”
Compare Wirecast to UStream Production Software and then you are talking about the same things.
I have not used wirecast, but when I used a seperate hardware video switcher, FMLE was perfect and did the job well with a dual core 4 gig ram pc.
I have used the UStream software and I find it to be worse than FMLE for being resource hungry.
Tommy Scully says
Willie, I’m glad your experience with FMLE was favorable! There are exceptions to every situation 🙂
Paul Clifford (@PaulAlanClif) says
I’ve been going back and forth. For some reason, I never lose sync with FMLE. With wirecast, I often do. I’ve got to figure that out.
One thing you didn’t mention that I’m excited about is streaming to multiple providers, of course I have a deal with Worship Channels, MyChurchLive, and StreamingForJesus (and most churches will only have one).
Paul
Michael says
I would agree that FMLE is a different product type that Wirecast. I’ve just been in a situation where we started streaming from Wirecast, drawn in by the production features (titles, easy switching, etc) but when it came to encoding we had major issues that were finally found to be Wirecast’s fault.
FMLE is incredibly stable, built and tested to run 24/7, Wirecast can’t compete with that just yet. I will say that I love the power of Wirecast’s out of the box feature set, great for laptop streaming on the go, but can’t stand by it as a super stable solution. I get what you’re saying, FMLE doesn’t offer a lot of visual ease of use on the GUI side, but I’ve found it to be incredibly reliable and robust even in the professional production arena.
George Yellott says
We recently switched one of our live streaming computers over to Wirecast Pro. (Our other 3 venues are still using Adobe FLME 3.2). For some reason, when we live stream on youtube, all is well (audio and video are in sync), however after YouTube auto-archives the video and adds it to our video manager, then the audio and video are way out of sync. This does not ever happen when we stream from our FLME encoders. Very strange given that they broadcast a good (in sync) video, but after they process it, the archived video and audio are way out of sync. Also the local recorded MP4 is perfect (no sync issues).