Hello!

I've got some info that I hope will help, and also some questions of my own that hopefully someone else can chime in on. I'm not a tech expert, but I've done lots of research and testing with our own meeting rooms. I frequently (multiple times per week) host events where we have as many as 40 people participating in events that include VOIP, heavily animated presentations (think Jib Jab made with PowerPoint), MP3 audio tracks and webcams. Needless to say, lag and other bandwidth issues are constant struggle for us!

In my experience, bandwidth issues on the user's end are usually the cause of delays, especially if not everyone is affected similarly. This is especially true when you have many people broadcasting audio and/or video simultaneously, such as during a class discussion. I've also seen it affect individuals by stopping their incoming audio, so they suddenly can't hear anything in the room. Others have issues when trying to use their webcam. I have one user who can share his webcam until about ten people are in the room, and then his image goes black on the video pod and the Connect add-in stops functioning on his PC. (I worked with that particular user in an attempt to track down the issue, and had no luck. I did hear from others in our company, though, that many other users who had the same model of PC had similar issues, to the point that they actually switched machines to fix it.)

If the same people seem to be having recurring issues, ask them to keep an eye on the color bar in the upper right hand corner of the Connect window and let you know if it changes from green to some other color, which would indicate a connection issue. (In 9.5, that's going to be replaced by a standard multi-bar icon, so it will be easier for people to locate and interpret.) It doesn't catch everything, though, so don't assume that if it stays green (or full bars) that a user's connection is solid.

Here are a few things that may ease the pain if only a few people are suffering lag:

1. See if you can change any of the room settings to reduce bandwidth.
2. If you are using VOIP for audio, ask people to go on mute or disconnect their audio when they are not speaking. Ditto that for webcams.
3. Try to share documents rather than sharing screens whenever possible, and make sure that the file sizes are reduced as much as possible. (if all participants are going to be viewing on computer monitors or smaller, images do not need enough resolution to look great on an IMAX screen!)
4. Pre-load data-heavy share-pod material (such as videos) and place other pods over them until you are ready to show them. That way, the video share pod can be open and fully buffered on everyone's systems before you start it. (Or, if you use multiple layouts, you can hide the share pod containing the video on the previous layout.)
5. Finally, if someone is severely lagged or they lose incoming audio, they may need to leave the room and re-join in order to dump the old data restore functionality.

Now, if everyone in attendance is suffering lag, it may be that the amount of data and the number of data streams that Connect is trying to layer are just too much for the server. Remember the warning in Ghost Busters about not letting the streams cross? Well, whether your Connect account is hosted or not, somewhere there's a machine that's taking the data from every pod and every user, and trying to instantly layer it all and send it back out to all the participants' devices, without anything going kablooie. I don't know exactly how much is too much, but I know that my meetings cross that line far too often.

If anyone has any further suggestions, I hope they'll share. In particular, I'd love to know if there's a best practice for meetings where we want simultaneous auditory and webcam participation from 30-50 people!

Some of this info is a bit over my head.  When you say 'change some of the room settings', what are the settings that are under our control to change?  All our files and videos (mp4s) are pre-loaded but what can we do to reduce file size?

We are all somewhat new to Adobe so we will have to play with this idea of hiding a video under a different pod.  But that is certainly something we can do.  In fact, trouble with a buffering video is something we experienced this past weekend and I was going to come here to ask about it. 

We also had a problem were a teacher (ie. host)  was 'kicked off' the meeting more than once.  Does this fall under the same bandwidth issue?  And if so, is there an easy reference document that describes what kind of internet users should have?  Keep in mind that most of our participants are 8 - 11 kids (and their parents) many if not most of whom are not very tech savy.

You probably need to have the Video pod on the desired layouts, but behind the other pods in the layout so the live video isn't seen by others. If the video pod is not on a layout, then the video broadcasts will end and need to be restarted when the video pod becomes available again.