Flexing from home - Clearview Flex

Considering our current circumstances, many of our ClearView Flex users will be either running or receiving review sessions from home. With this in mind, I wanted to share with you a few things you should bear in mind as you adapt to your new working environment.

Setting up your Flexbox

If you’re moving your Flexbox from your office to a home location or setting up a new box for the first time, bear in mind the Flexbox needs an ethernet connection and you will require either an HDMI cable or HD-SDIconnection to your video source. If your workstation is not located in the same room as your router you may need to source an extra long ethernet cable.

Bandwidth

Your ClearView Flexbox needs a minimum of 20Mbps* of upload bandwidth in order to stream successfully). It’s a good idea to limit other activities on your connection whilst your session is running if you don’t have ample connectivity at home. For those on the viewer side, the bandwidth needed is dependent on the quality setting. Viewers, of a single stream, will need 2-4Mbps for the low setting, 4-6Mbps for medium and 6-8mps for the high-quality setting. Bear in mind if you’re also running the Presenter app from the same location as your Flexbox you’ll need 20Mbps up and up to 8Mbps down in order to view the stream in your browser.

As the presenter, if any of your attendees are reporting drops or issues with their feed, it would be worth asking them to use a wired ethernet connection if they aren't already. If that does not help, you should lower the quality of the session to "low" and see if that fixes the problem as they might not have enough bandwidth available on their side for the medium/high-quality settings.

If your stream encounters a bad connection it’s possible we will lose a few frames of the video. This is by design, as the synchronisation of the streams for all viewers is paramount. If we were to buffer the video locally and not drop frames you’d soon be out of sync and watching entirely different shots, which does not work for remote review.

Devices

Flex is supported across multiple devices and your viewers do not require any specialist equipment to view asession from their home. For desktop and laptop users, all they will need is a Chrome or Firefox browser. Android users can run sessions on their native Chrome browser on their phone or tablet. Users on iPad or iPhone or Apple TV will need to download our free ClearView Flex app from the App Store.

Support

If you are in doubt about anything, check out our Help Center, which has a number of articles on FAQs and best practices or reach out directly to our support team at your local Sohonet office.

* Note: while the payload is 6 Mbps, background traffic from the home and the workstation add additional burden on the upload and our experience is that 20 Mbps reduces the contention rate to an acceptable level

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