Hazel Grove Baptist Church Streaming Sermons FAQ version 1.1; June 2004 1. Who's in charge here and how can I contact them? The streaming services are an outreach, evangelism and minsitry project of the Technlogy Team at Hazel Grove Baptist Church. The team is lead by Andy Blackham. His email address is streaming.support@hgbc.org.uk. 2. What is this document? This tries to answer as clearly and simply as possible all the common questions we get asked about streaming sermons from our website. The most current version of this FAQ can be downloaded from http://www.hgbc.org.uk/sermons/faq.txt 3. What is streaming? Streaming is also called 'On Demand'. This is where you hear the audio very quickly after clicking on a link. You do not need to download a complete audio file to jump to any point in the recording. 4. How is this different from Broadcasting, Webcasting and Live? In a web broadcast or 'Webcast' you listen to the audio as its sent, but you cannot jump around, just as you cannot fast forward the radio. This is normally reserved for live events like a service. 5. Why are you not using video Quality is paramount to what we're trying to do. If we used video as well as sound the limited capacity would mean overall quality would diminish greatly. I want to wait until bandwidth improves before we venture there. Also, we could only support 1 or 2 connections with video too. 6. What do you mean by high quality. We record the service (well 80 mins of a 90 min service) to a Philips Audio CD Recorder. That is the baseline for our listening tests. We convert that to a Maximum quality streaming MP4 file and put it on our web server. The conversion is at 64kbits. I think that the end results are very good. If you choose to download a sermon you get as 128k MP3 file. 7. What software do I need? To listen to a sermon on demand you need Quicktime To listen to a downloaded sermon you get a standard MP3 file, you can play with any media player, including itunes, realplayer, Windows Media player and winamp. 8. Does this work on a Mac? Of course. iTunes, Windows Media player, MacAmp, RealPlayer all work on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It has all been tested on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. 9. How many sermons can you hold? Well, we have capacity for around 30gb of audio. Each sermons is roughly 30MB so we have space for about 1,000. At 2 sermons per week, for 52 weeks per year thats over 9 years worth of content. That's not whole services, just sermons. 10. Why do you not have the whole service? We record to a Philips audio cd recorder. The longest blank discs are 80 mins. Our service is 90 mins so we have to cut a bit out. Usually thats the offering. It also takes us longer to process the files for the internet and it would ultimatly reduce the number of sermons we can offer for download. 11. The speech quality is better than the music, why? Its to do with the Aux audio mix from the front of House mixer. We're working in it. That too is a work in progress, only without the progress! 12. What hardware do I need? That depends on what you want to do. If you want to download the MP3 files so you can listen at you leisure and you have a lot of patitence then a modem will work. Be warned that you're downloading a 15MB file. I think that could easily take 90 mins. If you want to listen to streaming audio, then anything 64k and better, cable or ADSL will be fine. Even NTL's 150K service will work if you use the low bandwidth versions. 13. What about my version of Windows? If you can install WinAmp, RealPlayer or QuickTime then your windows is ok. This usually means Windows 98 or newer. My PC runs windows 98 wit Quicktime 6.5.1 and its fine. I don't have a windows 95 pc, so I can't test it. Its probably fair to say that someone with a PC that old won't have broadband. 14. Do I really need broadband? No. If you want to wait for each sermon and don't mind a long wait then no. If you want now, on demand, quality audio of your choice, then err. Yes you do. 15. Where do I get Quicktime and how much is it? You get Quicktime from Apple's website at http://www.apple.com/quicktime. It is free. There are two versions of Quicktime, you need the free one! It is available for Mac OS and Windows and they also offer iTunes for Windows XP which I also recomend. 16. How much does it cost There is no cost to you and a negligible cost to us. The real cost is in our time which we give freely to this work. If you would like to make a donation, then please call or email the church office. 17. What does error -404 mean? It means I made a mistake! Please email us to tell us what you were doing at the time. Under normal circumstances you should never see that! 18. The audio stream starts but then stops. Why? This usually means that you are listening to a high bandwidth stream on a low bandwidth connection. Try using the Low stream. If you are using a modem, you'll probably need to download the file and listen to it later. We may create streams suitable for modems at some point, but not any time soon.