Stream setup
The settings for a rock-solid
church stream.
PealCast is your streaming home. Send us one feed over SRT or RTMP with the settings below, hit go live, and every viewer becomes a named person for your weekly follow-up.
SRT or RTMP — both work
We give you both an SRT and an RTMP address. Use whichever your encoder supports — SRT is the steadier option, so your service never freezes mid-worship.
SRT vs RTMP vs BoxCast Flow vs Resi RSP →
SRT
PreferredSRT recovers from dropped packets and network jitter, so it holds a steady stream even on congested Wi-Fi or a stretched church uplink — the usual cause of freezes and dropouts. If your encoder supports SRT, use it.
RTMP
Fully supportedRTMP (RTMPS) is supported everywhere and is the simplest way to go live — a great choice on a solid wired connection. Every viewer gets the exact same watch experience as SRT. If your encoder or software only does RTMP, you’re in good shape.
Recommended encoder settings
Dial these in once and your stream stays smooth. They’re the same whether you use OBS, a hardware encoder, or another streaming provider.
Send us 1080p once — we handle the rest. You only ever send a single full-HD feed. We automatically produce the smaller versions for people on slow connections, so nobody has to choose between a sharp picture and a stream that keeps up. Set your bitrate to what your upload can reliably sustain; if it can’t hold 4,500 Kbps, lower the bitrate before you lower the resolution.
- Video codec
H.264 (AVC)
Required. Do NOT use HEVC/H.265 — it isn’t a supported input and won’t play.
- Audio codec
AAC
Required. 48 kHz sample rate, stereo.
- Rate control
CBR (constant bitrate)
Keeps the stream steady and prevents buffering. Avoid VBR.
- Video bitrate
4,500–6,000 Kbps
This is the lever that makes a stream smooth and clear. Use 6,000 for high-motion worship and 4,500 for a talking head or slides. Keep it well under 12 Mbps.
- Resolution
1920×1080 (1080p)
Send us full HD. We automatically create the smaller versions for people on slower connections, so a phone on patchy data still gets a smooth picture — you only ever send the one 1080p feed.
- Frame rate
30 fps
Match your camera if it’s 25/50/60. Note: 60 fps needs roughly double the bitrate to stay clean, so only raise it if your bitrate has room.
- Keyframe interval (GOP)
2 seconds
Anything from 2 to 8 seconds works well; 2 seconds is the safe default and what most encoders already use.
- SRT latency (buffer)
60 seconds in OBS (latency=60000000 on the URL) · 8000 ms on a Magewell · nothing to set on most hardware
Where you can reach it, this is the biggest reliability lever on a church network: the buffer lets the stream ride out congestion and packet loss without anyone seeing a freeze, and we are not low-latency, so the delay costs you nothing. Two things worth knowing. 65,535 ms is a hard ceiling for every SRT encoder — the protocol carries this value in a 16-bit millisecond field, so a 90-second request wraps around and lands as 24.5 seconds. And most hardware encoders (ATEM, AJA HELO Plus) expose no latency setting at all; they run the default, which is fine.
- Auto-reconnect
On · shortest retry delay · unlimited (or highest) retries
This matters more than the buffer, and most guides bury it. An SRT session ends after about five seconds of complete silence from the far end — that is the protocol’s peer-idle timeout, and no buffer setting extends it — so if your line genuinely drops, what gets your service back is the encoder redialling immediately and never giving up. Set the reconnect delay to the lowest value and the retries to unlimited (or the highest available).
- B-frames
Leave at your encoder’s default
No need to change this. B-frames make the picture look better at the same bitrate, and turning them off just spends bandwidth for nothing. (Some guides tell you to set 0 — that is only needed for low-latency streaming, which we deliberately don’t use.)
- Profile / GOP
High profile, closed GOP
Closed GOP is required. It is already the default in OBS and virtually all hardware encoders, so in practice there is nothing to change.
- Audio bitrate
160 Kbps
Clean music and voice. 128 Kbps is fine on a tight connection.
The one that trips people up: use H.264, never HEVC/H.265 — it won’t play.
Set it up in your encoder
OBS Studio
The free software encoder with the most control — we lay out every setting and exactly where to find it.
OBS setup guideHardware encoders
Any RTMP/SRT hardware encoder — paste your PealCast SRT or RTMP URL and key and go live. We have step-by-step guides for Blackmagic, Magewell and AJA, plus the five boxes we would actually buy.
Best encoders + setup guidesBoxCast · Resi · Restream
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