Feedback after 3 months of Live use.

mimoLive mimoLive Beta
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I made a thread already about some of the things I wanted to see added to mimoLive but I wanted to make a post about my feedback and use of the app so that some things can be fixed and addressed.

First thing I noticed was that while the app is running 64bit now, it still is pretty resource intensive. And even on my machine which has some pretty good specs, I found the program bogging down after long use and many layers. I think we need to take better advantage of the hardware thats available and the newer technologies that are available. Im personally not a fan of the Quartz for the layers and think that we could find a better solution with Apples programming languages. Especially now that Swift is open source.

Video files caused a lot of headache for us during our live events. Loading multiple (short) clips in lags the computer and causes the program to freeze up for a moment while it loads in. Could probably be avoided by doing something akin to Final Cut by referencing the original file path to get immediate use while copying the file to the .tvshow file in the background.

Even after I got the video files loaded in, sometimes i had trouble playing them. Sometimes they worked perfectly fine, sometimes they lagged for a second before playing, and sometimes when you hit live the timecode was at 00:00 and refused to play all forcing a restart of the application, and in some cases forcing me to delete the video files altogether and re-add them to the project file. This was the biggest issue we had was video files not playing friendly.

Live broadcasting as of right now seems to be a little unstable, at least for me. Im not sure how the encoding works but my bitrate fluctuates like crazy. In comparison streaming in something like OBS gives me a consistent bitrate. So not sure what the deal is there but something to look into.

I already mentioned in my feature request thread that we need scenes/groupings as that affected the overall speed and production quality of the broadcasts we have done.

The interface is a big improvement from BoinxTV however I’d like to see a master preview window that would allow me to view all my layers in a preview before sending it live. Very handy if I need to make a few changes on the go but want to keep the production quality up to par.

Thats the main things I can think of off the top of my head. I want to stress this isn’t me trying to complain about things, just simply providing feedback as I have used it in a professional environment and want to see the app get better. That being said, if any of the devs have questions for me based on our use cases in a live environment or things that I might have missed, I’m more then happy to answer them here.

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Thanks for your valuable feedback!

  1. 64-bit doesn’t mean that the CPU has to do less work. We are handling large amount of video data that needs to be pushed around in the memory and graphics card, so CPU cycle wise its more a bandwidth problem of the hardware buses of you computer hardware. Also the graphics card speed and the amount of video memory is a huge factor when it comes to performance. However the 64-bit gives us the chance to use more application memory than just 4 GB and don’t crash if the app needs more than that. We use QuartzComposer as a base technology for the rendering because its Apples business to keep it running as fast as possible on all machines, working smooth with all the graphics hardware out there and make it work on all OS-Xs. Thats something we at Boinx Software aren’t able to do.

  2. Video-File handling: Thans for the hint, we will have a look at it. You are saying that you add movie files to your mimoLive document while you are running a show already? This is something we didn’t expect, so we need to take care about this workflow.

  3. Hanging Movie Playback: We fixed some things in the movie playback in the last beta 2.0b28. Please check it out and report back, if it still not work for you!

  4. Unstable Live streaming: The Streaming Status panel is updated every second or so and displays the changes that happens within this time. The Streaming doesn’t get sent out in a continuos stream as one may expect but in larger junks. Since this is not bound to our update frequency this can look a bit choppy. We can understand that you expect a constant streaming rate, lets see if we can iron that out.

  5. Grouping layers is on our feature list.

  6. The classic Preview / Program view won’t work with the mimoLive paradigm. We want to have the users action to be reflected in the program out immediately.