This Quickguide will help you determine the best setting for broadcasting live.

How to find your upload speed

Go to speedtest.net

Click Begin Test this will capture your download and upload speeds as seen in the red box below.

Armed with this information you can determine what quality your bandwidth can stream. Panopto allows you to choose from a variety of quality to meet your bandwidth requirements.

For broadcasting we are concerned with the upload speed. With the example above it would be 8.43 Mbps.

Quality and Stream Settings

The quality and amount of streams that you record will determine the amount of bandwidth required to stream a session.

Standard Quality:
Audio Only – 48 kbps
Video and Audio – 298 kbps
Video, Audio, and Secondary Video – 548 kbps

High Quality:
Audio Only – 128 kbps
Video and Audio – 1128 kbps
Video, Audio, and Secondary Video – 2196 kbps

Ultra Quality:
Audio Only – 128 kbps
Video and Audio – 1628 kbps
Video, Audio, and Secondary Video – 2628

The use of Smooth Stream will also allow you to stream adatively, meaning that the bitrate of the file depends on the users connection to the server. For example, a High quality recording with Video, Audio, and Secondary Video will stream anywhere from 264 kbps to 2064kbps. For a more in depth explaination of Smooth Stream click here.

How to change Recording quality

To record in SmoothStream(BETA) go to settings in the recorder.

Disclaimer: SmoothStream is currently in the BETA stage and is not fully supported.

To choose the quality of the primary stream click the Create New Recording tab then select the radio button shown below.

To choose the settings of the secondary stream you can adjust the sliders shown in the red box below.

Please note: If using a capture card to record output from a camera source, it is recommended to use at least 44.1 kHz sampling rate output on the recording device to ensure maximum quality and compatibility.