Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmett | Hacker News Reader

We care a lot about stream quality at Twitch. Can I ask where you're watching from that you get so many stutters? That's a key metric we measure ("buffer empties per hour"), so I know for a fact it's not high everywhere.

View on HN

My primary problem with twitch streams is that even though I can easily get all the 1080p60 bytes onto my machine, the bloody web player can't keep up. My fans spin at max speed, and eventually it starts dropping frames.

Contrast that to running it in unstream (the windows app). Absolutely no problems. Hell I'm pretty sure my iphone can run the Source level streams better than Chrome on my macbook pro.

I'm not sure what the state of hardware accelerated video on OSX is, but at least on Linux Firefox doesn't support hardware decoding while Chromium does, and that leads to a 20% vs 5-10% CPU usage while watching Twitch source streams for me.

Not too long ago I did a check, was doing Twitch on Chrome / Macbook, and the thing just drained power. Turns out they were still using a Flash player, with a HTML5 player - which worked just fine and at a fraction of the power usage - an optional beta feature that I only managed to somehow activate using the browser's dev tools.

I hope the html5 player is the standard now.

Yes, the HTML5 player is now standard; Flash is only used as a fallback if HTML5 is not available.

Try Streamlink! Then you can watch the stream through VLC or any other player.

I live in San Jose.

I'll say this much: I appreciate that you tried to release 1080p60, but I am yet to see it succeed. I was watching the "Clash for Cash" between Virtus.Pro and Astralis the other day (Friday?), and it was in 1080p60 on both YT and Twitch.

I eventually left your service to go to YouTube to watch there, because it was stuttering to the point of un-watchability on Twitch, and buttery smooth on YT.

unless you're talking about mobile you can use streamlink (or livestreamer) + mpv (or vlc) and all your problems will go away

you might need to tweak the config a bit

I gave up using Twitch on a browser, it just sucks (and they keep adding more bloat, weird page refreshes that often load the videos twice, notifications that I have to close every single time unless I'm keeping their cookies permanently)

Those stutter too all the time, chunks of video get skipped, etc. If your link to twitch is not good enough, `livestreamer` won't help very much. Though this is infinitely better than twitch player that can't even hide its controls reliably.

I don't know the technical details but for me and everybody else I ever recommended it always fixes the stutters. Multiple ISPs and computers were tested too. Maybe it's because I'm not from the US?

One thing I'm sure is that it uses way less CPU and helps with my ISP throttling because anything 720p60 and above is a problem if I'm using a browser.

There are options to modify the buffer, reconnect and more but I almost never change my config except for hls-live-edge like once a year (for something that is not Twitch).

For me, it's not stuttering but rather YouTube streams perform better given the same quality setting. For example, my connection sometimes fails to smoothly serve 1080p60 on Twitch yet handles YouTube's 1080p60 pretty well.

I wonder if that's because YouTube uses adaptive streaming, so it may continue to show you "1080p" content, but with slightly fewer bits of data to accommodate the decline in internet speed.

How does that work? Different compression levels?

My consistent experience is that Twitch's video quality isn't as crisp as Youtube's for a given bitrate particularly around the 480-720 region, which is important for me when watching something like Dota on my TV. Although I have a ~5.5Mbit connection, I've sometimes noticed times when 720p will buffer on Twitch but not on Youtube due to my internet being right on the tipping point of being able to stream each. Right now it's holding up fine, pulling ~450KB/sec for 720p60. I'm in Brisbane, Australia.

When the Dota International is on in August, I encourage you to boot up both Youtube and Twitch side by side and have a look at the visual quality at certain bitrates.

I'm also Australian, and cannot watch 720p60 on Twitch. 16mbps downstream over ADSL2+ in Melbourne.

720p60 is fine on YouTube. 1080p60 on YouTube will stutter depending on what my girlfriend is doing on the Internet, but is watchable if I'm home alone.

Anything over 720p60 won't even try to start playing on Twitch.

I'm one of the Lucky Few who have real NBN (100mbit down). YouTube 1080p60 is fine, but Twitch and Mixer seem to be coming from Hong Kong and stutter / drop out.

I think one huge difference between Twitch and YouTube is that the CEO of Twitch will still personally respond to someone on HN when they have troubles streaming :'D

For some reason, your website interface is the problem, both on firefox and chrome for me. I know it's the website and not my connection because apps like Orion are able to play your streams at the highest bandwidth setting flawlessly for me.

Already-open pages are supposed to start playing when the streamer goes live, right? Because it's been very consistently not doing that.

I live in South Africa. I can stream 1080p from YouTube with no issues, but Twitch is usually one of two outcomes: stuttering/lag across all browsers or, since the auto quality feature has been implemented, jumping between 720p and 144p, constantly adjusting quality.

Occasionally I can watch 720p just fine, but this is rare. I've resorted to watching tournaments like TI on YouTube, with the Twitch chat popped out for extra entertainment.

I live in South Africa and have the same experience.

I have tried to watch the LoL LCS numerous times using Twitch over the years, with stuttering/lag making it unwatchable.

I solely watch it on Youtube now.

Same in Belarus (but both iPad and PS4 Twitch apps handle 720p just fine on the same network).

Same in Australia (except with 100 mbps down)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com