Experiencing a audio echo during a live video stream? I did too and after searching for hours for a solution on the web, to no avail, I troubleshooted the issue and figured out what was causing the audio echo.

A few technical notes about my live video stream . . . I was streaming in flash, using a tri-caster, I was using the JWplayer rtmp live video embed code.

I had a ton of scripts happening on my live stream page including Flickr photo streams, live chat, facebook commenting, facebook live chat, and more. Through a process of elimination, I found that the live video stream echo was happening because of the facebook apps I had embedded.

Interestingly enough, the live video stream echo was only occuring in Internet Explorer, not in Firefox or Safari. To make things more weird, it was only happening sparadically in IE. There was no rym or reason to which machines were getting an audio echo on the live video feed. After researching it a bit more, I found that IT has a "Compatability Mode" and when this is turned on, the echo happens.

So there are really three solutions to resolving the audio echo during a live video stream. 1) Instruct your viewers to use Firefox, Safari, or anything besides Internet Explorer. 2) Instruct them to turn off compatability mode in IE. 3) Get rid of your facebook apps that are embedded on your page.

Hope this helps. Comments are always welcome.

Feedjit has some pretty cool embeddable widgets that you will allow you and your viewers to watch your site traffic live on your site. It's as easy as a cut and paste to get it up and going and best of all, they have a free version or a pay version if you would like to totally customize it and take their logo off. Here are the four main embeddable widgets they offer:

Live Traffic Feed
Feedjit's live traffic feed shows statistics on your website in real-time. It shows which city and country your visitors are in, the website they arrived from, the page they visited on your website, and which external link they clicked to leave your site.

Live Traffic Map
Feedjit's live traffic map shows the geographic locations of the last 100 visitors to your blog or website on a small map. If you move your mouse over any point on the map the city and country for that visitor will be displayed.

Recommended Reading Widget
Feedjit's Recommended Reading Widget suggests other pages on your Blog or Website that may interest your readers. It does this using a sophisticated algorithm called Collaborative Filtering.

Page Popularity
This widget shows the most popular pages on your blog or website by analyzing your recent traffic patterns. It constantly updates as new visitors arrive on your website and maintains an up to date list of popular pages.

Looking to stream live video in a flash video format but not sure whether to use H.264 or VP6? After streaming many hours of live video, a clear winner has emerged. First, let's take a brief look at both the H.264 and the VP6 formats.

The TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary video codec developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files. VP6 is a high-quality, low bitrate video compression codec. The codec is free for personal/non-commercial use.

The H.264 codec is a state-of-the-art video codec developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group. The H.264 codec delivers stunning quality at remarkably low data rates. Ratified as part of the MPEG-4 standard, this codec gives you excellent results across a broad range of bandwidths. By the way, this codec is also free.

So as far as the best flash live video streaming format goes which is better? After doing some testing, there is a noticeably higher picture quality with the H.264 codec. I achieved a considerably better video and audio quality on my live video streaming using the H.264 codec. In order to get the VP6 codec to obtain the same level of quality as the H.264 I had to run the VP6 stream bit rate 40% higher than what I was running the H.264 stream at.

Bottom line, I would highly recommend the H.264 as the best flash video live streaming format codec I have run across. So next time you produce a live video stream using flash, get the best quality possible and use the H.264 codec.

If you would like to be able to easily embed a Flickr photo slideshow into your website, seek no further. FlickrSlidr is a new tool which makes it super easy. All you have to do is enter the URL of the user, photo set or group you'd like to embed, give it some tags and a description, set your width and height and you’ll receive the code to copy and paste right into your website.

To begin embedding a Flickr slideshow on your site, visit http://flickrslidr.com.

One of the very cool things you can do to your personal website or blog is to embed Facebook widgets. Here are a few of the ones I have found to work well.

Profile Badge - Share your Facebook information on other websites.

Photo Badge - Share your Facebook photos on other websites.

Fan Badge - Show off your favorite Pages on your website or blog.

View these Facebook widgets at www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

Haven't seen any posts out there regarding an audio echo issue while streaming live video through JW player. I experienced this here recently while streaming a live event from Florida. Although I have not totally solved the issue, here are some things I have discovered.

• There seems to only be an audio echo with individuals using certain versions of Internet Explorer.
• If you pause the live video player the video stops but the audio does not . . . and there is no longer and echo which makes me think there are two audio tracks playing in the background. When you pause the video, it pauses the video track and one of the audio tracks, but the other audio track is still playing.
• I am embedding the JW player on a page with a bunch of other code. Looks like when I embed it on a really simply page with little to no code, the problem goes away.

Here are some temporary fixes I have found to resolve the audio echo while streaming live video through JW player.

• There is no audio echo when using Firefox or Safari.
• There is no audio echo when you turn off the "compatability view" in Internet Explorer. This can be done by going to the menu bar and clicking on "Tools" and then unchecking "Compatability View".

Still trying to figure out exactly why the delay is happening. I will update this post when I completely solve the issue.

Okay, I thought I would put a quick post out on this since I spent over an hour combing forums and sites trying to figure out how to embed a live RTMP flash video stream. I was using the JW longtail player (which I would highly recommend) and was going through their setup wizard and still couldn't get the rtmp stream to work . . . so here is what I found out.

The information I was working with was my server and stream name:
Server: rtmp://video110.techwerks.tv/live
Stream Name: myStream

The main issue was I couldn't figure out how to specify in the code my stream name. Finally, I figured out that your "stream name" has to be included right after your server info like this as well as identifying the "type" of stream it is which in this case is "rtmp".

Here is the line of code that identifies the server and stream name:
rtmp://video110.techwerks.tv/live&file=myStream&type=rtmp

Once I figured this bit of code out, the JW player worked great. You can check out the full code on the page I setup at: http://www.lifeaction.org/hcclive if you would like to see it in action . . . just click on view source to check it out. Hope you find this helpful. Happy streaming!