Tom Cantu who works for Christian Radio Station “Radio Vida KRGE 1290 AM” is having some issues with Windows Media Encoder. He writes:

I stumbled across your Website Digital Inspiration when I was looking for some information concerning dropping packets or as our Provider for re-broadcasting our radio signal to satellite tells us that when streaming some content using Windows Media Encoder 9.0 some of the content may cause rebuffering.

I would like to know if you would be kind enough to share some information regarding this process. I’ll give you some details about how and what we are doing and you can tell me how I should be performing this operation.

In our engineer room, we have a Dell Dimension 1100 computer with 1gig of memory. This computer is dedicated for streaming audio and only performs this process. Via the line-in input of the built-in audio portion of the Dell, our broadcasted program is fed into the computer.

The OS is Win XP Home Ed and we are using Win Media Encoder 9.0. Our Internet Service Provider provides us with about 1.5mbps wireless bandwidth. To my knowledge the service has been consistent and trustworthy that I don’t think the bandwidth could be more than just considered. We stream our programming via internet to an Audio/Video re-broadcaster who in turn sends the signal to Hispasat which allows our programming to be received in different parts of the world.

We need to setup a bullet proof way to monitor our feeds integrity to the re-broadcaster. We placed a satellite dish on our rooftop to monitor our signal from the Hispasat Satellite but have yet to lock-in on the exact location. Our geographical location needs to be considered as well as the size of dish to install.

What other way can I monitor our signal after the streamed signal leaves the dedicated computer? How can I resolve a re-buffering issue if in fact that is what is happening? Is there a hotfix to help encode consistently. Which is better, push to server or pull from encoder? We have another stream feed which is received in California that is provided for our website and rarely experience any service interruptions.

Can anyone help Tom ?