In addition to streaming, the VS-R265 will also record to its built-in SD card slot, or through its USB port to a user-provided storage device.
For churches that were already streaming before COVID-19, the last few months have been about upping their game and making their video stream as engaging and high-quality as possible. For churches that had yet to start streaming their services, it’s been a crash course in making it happen in any way they can. For one very small church I know, this meant setting up a laptop with a software streaming encoder and pointing the laptop’s webcam at the platform. Most other churches I know are investing in cameras, switchers, and streaming devices.
There are a lot of options out there, and we’re going to take a look at Tascam’s streaming offering: the VS-R265 UHD (and HD) streaming system.
Overview
The VS-R265 is an all-inclusive video encoder and decoder, designed to support up to UHD video input from an HDMI input port. (HD is also supported.) It can be configured to automatically stream to popular streaming services such as YouTube, DaCast, Wowza Cloud, Wowza streaming engine, and also offers a generic RTMP protocol for streaming to other providers.
In addition to streaming, the VS-R265 will also record to its built-in SD card slot, or through its USB port to a user-provided storage device. It can also be configured to automatically upload the recorded video file to a user-specified FTP site on completion of recording.
Connections to the VS-R265 are straight-forward: There’s an HDMI input port for encoding; an HDMI output port for decoding; both unbalanced and balanced audio connections for encoding; a USB3 port for attaching a hard drive or other storage system; and a gigabit Ethernet port for connecting to your LAN.
On the front panel is the SD card slot; a Stream button to start the streaming; a Record button to start recording; and indicator lights to show that a valid input signal is being received, and if the audio signal is clipping.
Three choices are available when setting up your video input for audio selection: you can use the audio coming in over the HDMI connection; you can use the audio coming in over the balanced audio Phoenix connectors; or you can use the audio coming in over the unbalanced 1/8-inch stereo input jack.
Setup
Setup is simple—you simply connect the unit to your Ethernet network, and connect a camera and audio (if needed) to the HDMI jack and audio connectors, and you’re good to go.
To setup the streaming parameters, you use a web browser to connect to the VS-R265. Tascam provides the Tascam Discovery application with the unit, which will query the network and identify any Tascam streaming devices available. Once found, you can click the Open button next to the unit you want to work with.
Alternatively, if you already know the IP address of the unit, you can enter that directly into your browser to access the unit.
Once connected, you are presented with the “dashboard” for the unit. It has four tabs to access the various functions of the system: Encoder Control, Decoder Control, Device Settings, and Advanced. In Encoder Settings, you set things such as which audio input should be used; What scaling (if any) you want applied to the input video; and the encoding CODEC and parameters. You also provide information on how you want the video to be streamed, and to where. For example, if you are going to stream to YouTube, you first go through a one-time setup to associate your device with your YouTube account by providing it a YouTube generated key. (Note that you must enable your YouTube channel for streaming; this takes 24 hours once this is requested from YouTube. No, I don’t know why…) You create a Stream on your YouTube account, and select that stream in the VS-R265’s Dashboard. Once that is done, pressing the Stream button on the unit’s front panel will start sending the stream to YouTube. On the YouTube end, when you’re ready to make the stream available to the public, you press the Go Live button, and you’re on the air.
The protocols supported by the VS-R265 are RTMP, HLS, Unicast 1, Unicast 2, Multicast, and RTSP. And, it can generate these all simultaneously.
If you want to stream on multiple public services simultaneously, there are online services (restream.io being one example) that you can use to distribute your stream to numerous platforms simultaneously.
Similarly, you can set up the device to work with other streaming services, or to stream directly to end-users if the viewer count is small (bypassing streaming services such as YouTube.) For example, you could use the VS-R265 to stream directly between two campus locations, once the appropriate Firewall settings to allow the stream through your out-going and in-coming Firewalls are configured. (This I did not test due to the complexities of Firewall settings. Your church’s IT staff would need to work with you on this.)
Impressions
For someone pretty new to the nuts-and-bolts of setting up streaming, I found the VS-R265 easy to set up. I had one issue where the Tascam Discovery app did not find the unit when I ran it on my laptop, but it did work from my desktop computer. I expect that there’s something configured on my laptop that prevented it from seeing the unit, given that it worked perfectly fine on my desktop system.
I did discover that the VS-R265 only works with progressive video; a 60i signal will not work with it. My older Canon C100 only puts out HD in interlaced format from its HDMI port, so I was not able to use that camera with the unit. My Panasonic AU-EVA1 worked fine with the unit. Most cameras these days can put out progressive HD video, so this should not be a problem for most people. However, it’s worth checking your camera’s specifications to make sure that the HDMI Output port will put out progressive. Note that just because a camera can record in progressive (which the C100 can), does not mean that it’ll put progressive video out of the HDMI port.
Similarly, the decoder side was also easy to set up, once I figured out how to set up my computer to send out a stream for it to decode. I used VLC Media Player to create a unicast stream, and the VS-R265 had no problem decoding it, sending it to my TV via the HDMI output port. I played a 45-minute video through it without a hitch.
The recording function also worked well, as did the FTP upload function for completed recordings. I recorded to a portable hard drive, and once the recording completed, it was immediate transferred via FTP to my website’s FTP server. If you do any post-production on your video stream before making it available later in the week for replay, the FTP function is a great convenience to get it up to somewhere your video editors can get at it immediately after the service concludes.
The VS-R265 has an MSRP of $1,999, and seems very reliable and well-built. If you only care about HD streaming and don’t anticipate moving to UHD anytime soon, you can save $500 and go with the VS-R264—an identical unit that only streams up to HD resolutions.
