Get a vMix broadcast onto your Primcast server without the usual false starts. This guide lists the fields vMix asks for and exactly what belongs in each one, so it works whichever version you have.
vMix shifts its controls around between versions, so what follows names the boxes and what goes in them instead of a menu route. Find the labels wherever your build keeps them. Anything in UPPERCASE is yours, from your Primcast account.
Five values, and they sit together in two places: your Primcast control panel, and the activation email we sent when the service went live.
Don't guess the application name. live turns up in a lot of general tutorials, so it gets typed in out of habit — and if it isn't the one on your account, the server simply turns the connection away. Copy yours across instead.
More first broadcasts come unstuck here than anywhere else. Add a destination in vMix and set it to a Custom RTMP Server; the address and the key then ask to be filled in separately.
The box marked URL takes the address and the application name. It stops there:
rtmp://YOUR-SERVER-ADDRESS:1935/YOUR-APPLICATION-NAME
The box marked Stream Key — older builds say Stream Name — takes the stream name on its own:
YOUR-STREAM-NAME
What doesn't work is running the two together in the first box:
rtmp://YOUR-SERVER-ADDRESS:1935/YOUR-APPLICATION-NAME/YOUR-STREAM-NAMEThere's no helpful error for this one — the connection is just refused. Which is exactly why it's worth ruling out first.
The username and password from step 1 go on that same destination. They're the publishing pair for the stream — not the details you use to sign in to Primcast.
Small setting, large consequences — and one to set by hand rather than leave to a preset. In the quality settings for your stream, pick a custom profile and set:
Here's why it earns its own step. Your broadcast gets chopped into HLS segments, and the cuts land on keyframes. Space the keyframes unevenly and the segments come out uneven too — which your viewers feel as buffering, and which from every angle looks like our server having a bad day. Even spacing, even segments.
Add the video and audio bitrates together — that combined figure is what has to fit up your connection. Keep it near a third of the upload you've measured and there's room left for a bad minute.
Reasonable places to start, then tune to the line in front of you:
Measure from the machine doing the broadcasting, at the hour you'll be broadcasting, and more than once. The figure on your internet bill is a ceiling rather than a promise, and a single speed test is one lucky sample. Running right at the limit is what produces "it drops a couple of times a day" — and from where you're standing that is indistinguishable from a fault at our end.
Put the broadcasting machine on a cable. Wi-Fi wobbles, and this is the setting where wobble shows up.Start the broadcast — then go and look at it yourself rather than taking vMix's word for it. Open the playback address in any player:
http://YOUR-SERVER-ADDRESS:1935/YOUR-APPLICATION-NAME/YOUR-STREAM-NAME/playlist.m3u8
Allow it a few seconds. Nothing plays until the first segments have been written.
vMix picks itself up after a dropout on its own, and there's no setting for it — no box to tick, nothing to go looking for. If somebody has told you to switch on automatic reconnection in vMix, they had a different encoder in mind.
Worth being straight about the limit, though. Reconnecting decides how tidily a broadcast recovers; it doesn't decide whether the break happens. A connection that goes away takes your viewers with it for those seconds. If the breaks keep coming back, step 5 is where to look.
Questions we get asked about running vMix into Primcast.
