Revision demoparty banned on Twitch mid-stream | Hacker News Reader

Revision demoparty banned on Twitch mid-stream

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…and CCC helps them get back up: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/revision/revision

It's amazing how fast they got everything back up. And at a higher quality than Twitch, too! The c3voc folks are heroes.

Quality is terrific. Probably because the lo-fi frames compress nicely! Underscores the need for a dedicated video service for live coders, algo ravers, demosceners, etc. Mux would be an interesting sponsor here ;)

Demos, especially modern/highend prods with tons of noise and other tiny details (scanline filters, fractals, ...), are legendarily ruthless encoder killers.

Kind of ironic, given how small the sources are.

Interesting challenge

Smallest demo that compressed to the largest video file

Cat /dev/random?

Surely dd would be faster than that.

/dev/random is super slow and even /dev/urandom is surprisingly slow. If you care about performance, something like round reduced AES or ChaCha would be a decent choice.

OpenBSD /dev/(u)random uses ChaCha20 and gives me a few hundred MB/s on recent hw.

That would actually be really easy to replicate in such a way that no human could tell the difference.

Somewhat lacking in the aesthetic department

That actually nicely illustrates the parallel between AI and compression. An 'almighty' AI would be able to reverse engineer the source code from what it sees and compress it back down to that size.

But then it might determine that the best compression would be no transmission at all, and decide to eradicate any potential viewers. Those damn pesky almighty AIs.

What streaming tech / infrastructure do they use?

A bunch of custom stuff around industry and open standards, from camera to mixer to transcoder to CDN to browser code.

https://c3voc.de/wiki/docu:overview

The 4K PC intro competition is incredible, well-worth watching in full.

If you didn't know they were entirely rendered in realtime by just 4K of code, you might think you were just watching a series of beautiful, well-produced music videos.

(A few of the 256-byte ones afterwards get pretty hair-raising too.)

I might ask here; RTX has been out for 2.5 years, has there been any cool demos (in the demoscene sense) that use RTX in an interesting way? Because I can't recollect any, but then I have been following the scene pretty loosely lately.. I would have imagined its a tech that some coders would be very interested in.

There is already a lot of raytracing in the demoscene, no need for RTX.

RTX accelerates ray intersection on a typical scene from a video game. But demos are usually not typical scenes, instead using mathematical models like signed distance fields that work differently.

There are other issues: you need compatible hardware, it is not well supported by OpenGL if at all, there may be too much overhead for 64k or less intros.

Personally I don't see how to take advantage of it in a way that opens new options, but maybe someone else will do. After all, it is something the scene is good at.

Demos outside of small sized intros usually still work with traditional mesh geometry, so RTX could have been helpful at least there. It's just not that many people are doing big demos anymore.

For small intros it's almost as you say -- RTX is mostly uninsteresting and not that helpful for current status quo at least on the surface. However, while SDFs are do indeed provide a relatively cheap and intuitive way to specify your scene spatially to allow ray tracing and GI approximation with varying degrees of fakiness, they confine you to a rather limited abstract geometry stlye. Anything beyond yet another repeated-rotated-cube-with-cutouts-fractaled-to-death is rather uncomfortable to pull off and is also usually very slow (see iq's incredibly realistic works). That's why most of the intros from last 10+ years look rather similar.

Also, I've been recently playing with Vulkan ray tracing extensions and turns out it's not that hard to pull off. There's a considerable upfront cost (Vulkan being verbose as it is), but it's totally manageable, around maybe 10-20k compressed. The entire PoC intro with music was about 60k, and I haven't even started optimizing it for size. It had also been compressed with "just" UPX (apparently ray tracing extensions work only in 64-bit mode, so more sophisticated compressors are out of the question). I've heard that recent work on native 64bit compressor from Ferris removed another 16k from it, so there's definitely a lot of room for actual content in 64k+rtx.

Are you the same provod[1] that's adding Vulkan and rtx support to Xash3D/Half Life 1?

[1]https://www.twitch.tv/provod

yes

I was fearing that Vulkan might be bit verbose for small intros (like e.g. 4k)... Do you happen to know if DirectX (DXR) is as bad these days?

Vulkan is just overkill for 4k, apart from music most 4k's these days is just a 1(sometimes 2) shaders with a TINY OpenGL/d3d loader stub to kick them off (basically compile the shaders, and setup and render a quad over the full screen).

I was playing around with mesh-gen for 4k back in 2010 and you'd eat up most of your budget before even rendering, this is why SDF based raymarching reigns supreme for 4k intros (and are quite popular for larger categories as well).

Yeah, only reason I was thinking of Vulkan is that afaik it (and DXR) is the only way to use RT cores at all. Not for the other fancy stuff that big game engines need and use (complicated state/resource management etc).

And I'd be kinda surprised if you couldn't do something interesting with RT cores even in size-limited formats (possibly more in 64k than 4k though), even if maybe not quite the way nvidia intended.

I'm not sure there's an obvious way to (ab)use RT cores for something not directly RT-related. I don't know about DXR, but Vulkan RT API is rather high-level. You never see RT cores directly, you can just produce an opaque Acceleration Structure objects, handles to which can be used as an input into some shader functions. The way these ASes are built is rather rigid, and you never see what's inside (i.e. there's no actual guarantee that they're implemented using a BVH of sorts). Shaders are also directly RT-specific, i.e. you can only ask questions like "what will I hit if the ray is cast from this point into that direction". There's no API to e.g. traverse an AS manually, although you can get your hands on non-nearest hits if you want (for e.g. transparency).

You can sensibly use RT APIs together with raymarching. There is a notion of custom geometry that's specified using bounding boxes. When ray hits one, it's your responsibility to compute an exact intersection manually in the shader. This can definitely help with complex scenes with a lot of very different sdf objects that don't intersect much.

But yeah, in that case you'd still have to pay the Vulkan price first. I might experiment with what can be the size-chepest way to get vk rendering.

i don't know a thing about modern directx :D (the intros i work on are almost always developed on linux and only then ported to windows for official/party release)

Is anything capable of disrupting Twitch at this point?

YouTube would be impossible to disrupt, but Twitch is ephemeral. So maybe if enough people got outraged?

Microsoft tried and failed, plus Facebook and Google never really got anywhere. The irony is most people on twitch are surprisingly unhappy with it and want a better alternative. The other thing to know is that twitch is still a significant money loser for Amazon.

Which is weird, because out of all of the platforms, Twitch keeps the biggest cut of ad revenue. They rate all ads at a fixed cost regardless the size of the streamer (which is bonkers). Twitch should have systems in place by now to make the most off an ad run on the biggest streamers, but they're doing a really poor job of it. Amazon does seem to be exerting some influence here to rectify this though (see recent metrics changes to Twitch APIs).

This actually leads me to believe that Twitch users are probably at like a 95%+ AdBlock install rate.

Like YouTube, Twitch is pretty good at bypassing adblockers.

I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad on either.

And also the main point was that Twitch does a terrible job at monetizing off their ads. They have the worst advertising platform.

Ads on Twitch run for all streamers. There's very little targeting capability and they strike individual deals for all ads on their system rather than purchase from a DSP.

Twitch takes a 30-50% cut of revenue from subs, which is an incredible money printing machine. Ads aren't there to make money for twitch. They're there to annoy users into subscribing.

As much as you're right here, you missed the point.

They're still struggling to make a profit.

Turns out their business probably needs both to work.

I don't think this is true at all. I think Amazon has realized they can't make twitch profitable just from subs, and are heavily pushing ads in order to try to fundamentally change how they make money with it. I also think Amazon, the entire company, is making a big push towards ads. Amazon is still terrible with ads, but I think this is one of the overarching themes of how the company is shifting focus in the near future.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/14/do-amazon-...

What you're saying is demonstrably true from recent attempts by Amazon to overhaul Twitch's ads platform.

Twitch itself replaced HitboxTV, which was pretty much in Twitch's situation today: a de facto monopoly, and technical issues (they offered either the resource hungry Flashplayer or a semi-broken HTML5 implementation).

SO what will disrupt Twitch is the same thing as usual: a combo of a greedy company, a user experience that gets worse and worse, and a new tech coming out.

> a combo of a greedy company, a user experience that gets worse and worse, and a new tech coming out

Interestingly Youtube has 2 out of 3 - greedy company running ads every 3 minutes, and constant full screen badgering about cookies and sign-ups. I wonder what the new tech will be that will complete the set?

You don't think that PeerTube can do it ?

End users don’t care about decentralization — it’s not a feature, it’s an implementation detail. Unless PeerTube beats competitors on UX (both for viewers and creators), why use it?

Creators have been pissed off about ContentID for nearly a decade now, but until recently there wasn't a good enough alternative to YouTube.

PeerTube doesn't even help there, it just means that innocent end users will be hit with DMCA notices. In a way it's worse than BitTorrent because at least with BT you could make some kind of argument that end users knew they were doing something illegal (even if that argument was dubious). Now you'll have people visiting a website that looks a lot like Youtube and getting DMCA notices because of some background music in a video they were watching.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I think PeerTube is great technology and I hope it wins, I just don't think it has any chance of supplanting Youtube any time soon).

Has anyone visiting PeerTube been hit with a DMCA notice? I'm curious please provide any links you have to articles.

I doubt it's popular enough for any of these parasite legal companies to bother right now. That can change if it becomes popular. No I don't have any links.

Depending on the country, getting hit with a DMCA notice carries more or less weight. The ones sending the notice might also need to be very clear about what you did wrong. And a notarized letter is less easily prone to spam and abuse than a message inside YouTube's system. And you'll be probably able to win in court if the claim is spurious.

Much better than the current situation with YouTube's ContentID where the presumption of innocence is routinely violated, not to mention all the other issues : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trIn90HTqKs

(Also, the way the current ContentID might be violating European laws deriving from Article 13, but I haven't really been following that lately...)

Oh that's an easy one. The new tech is when YouTube invents a way to prevent adblocking.

Youtube would be theoretical able, if they get their shit together and fix their aweful attitude and technology. They have the size, the ability and money...but for some reason social services & user friendliness is a big blind spot for google and they regulary fail hard in that area. And this shows in youtube streaming-area which is so user hostile that it even has started to shrink now.

Youtube is Google owned.

Anything that is owned by Google won't improve but rather decline:

- search? Was at its best in 2007

- Reader? Killed after spending all the air in the rss market.

- Google+? Killed after they'd suffocated a few interesting alternatives.

- etc

(notable exception: after a decade they've actually stopped serving me insulting ads - but I do wonder if that wasn't Google but rather the advertiser who got whiff that Google sent their expensive "targeted" ads to everyone.)

It is possible. Here’s how:

- reach out to 20 biggest streamers on twitch and get them to agree to move to your platform, the same way spotify got Joe Rogan to move from YT to Spotify

- with signed agreements ready get funding

- build the platform, and all accompanying streamer tools, preferably fix all major issues that twitch has

- set the date for launch

- launch, with all your onboarded twitch streamers streaming “we moved to platform x” on their abandoned twitch channels

- profit

Note: this requires a few million USD, but it is definitely doable. In fact, YC could get a few investors and build this in a year, if they wanted to.

Isn't that what Mixer did, and failed?

Among others. It’s easy to beat twitch from a comment section, but well funded companies have tried and failed.

I like the formula, though I'd maybe instead aim for 200 mid tier streamers with good growth potential for the same money.

I think you're heavily underestimating necessary investment. I would say by a factor of 2 easily[1] in practice more like 3-4 because once you go in you want to have a decent chance of success. Also ignoring the fact that as soon as it starts working, you have Amazon on your back with much much deeper pockets than you to keep market of viewers acting irrational.

Anegdata, I just stopped listening to Joe Rogan, despite liking Spotify more than Youtube. I was on the fence anyway, I'm lazy and so on.

It seems to me that we're at the point where it takes the next generation of kids for a new service to get into a crowded space. Because popular people on the platform (it's always about these hubs, that you got right I think) just become older and less relatable.

1. https://checkpointxp.com/2020/12/17/highest-paid-twitch-stre... take into account that somebody likely paid for most pixels on the screen before they even start streaming

Mixer kind of tried to do the same thing and failed. Twitch is more of a community at this point and is really hard to disrupt. I follow more than a dozen streamers on twitch and one of them moving to another platform isn't much of an incentive for me to change my primary platform. If anything it's an annoyance.

Mixer and other big players tried this and failed, with tens-to-hundreds million usd spend involved.

The 20 biggest streamers alone would require well over 8 figures, possibly even 9 figures. Cloning Twitch's functionality would cost millions as well, as well as millions in monthly running costs. CDN bandwidth is not cheap.

If you want to beat Twitch, solve the discoverability problem.

Twitch provides absolutely no discoverability to streamers. It's purely a function of big gets bigger. They have zero design or plans to help streamers connect with the viewers who are interested in them (it's not "Playing Game X"). The primary way that Twitch streamers at 100+ viewers get new ones is via Youtube Clips + Twitter!

The first company to reasonably solve this problem will capture the lower 80% of Twitch's streamers.

Weirdly, YouTube has discoverability of normal videos nailed, but not for gaming streams either. There is tremendous opportunity here.

Any word on why they were banned?

One of the demos had a nipple in it. Probably got flagged by an algorithm.

Good god, a nipple. Imagine if children were around, they've never seen a nipple before! /s

I don't appreciate the sarcasm. Seeing a nipple can have serious effects on the psyche of a still-developing child. Luckily, the chance to see one (even by accident) is very small, since we banned nipples in 2017, and very few people now have them.

The sight of those diagonal nipple removal stripper tools.

I'm curious, what are those serious side-effects? Humans have seen nipples since...forever? These sounds just like another crazy theory

It's irony.

Maybe this guy has no nipples.

many white males still have their nipples despite the ban. I feel the ban is mainly enforced on females. which is a shame.

True. I wonder where the limit goes. If a male has bigger breasts and show a nipple, would that be bannable? What if a male gets breast implants a shows a nipple, bannable? Or vice-versa, a girl with very small breasts but showing nipple gets banned while a man with same size breasts showing nipple doesn't get banned?

How in the holy hell did the US get that way? It's in no way Twitch's fault, I just wonder how an entire country went that way...

> How did the US get that way?

Influence of prudish christian sects that preached that people should look modest and cover themselves and that any display of eroticism is a temptation to sin. Add hundreds of years of cultural "refinement" and you end up with a ban on casual nipples.

> Why the gender difference?

Well classically if a prudish women would find a man working and sweating topless and a bunch of young women enjoying the show giggling, both would be shouted at for indecent behavior and the man would be asked to cover up. It is that "cultural refinement" that created a gap by allowing the sexual objectification of men in cola commercials, while banning female nipples. Most such taboos have fallen in the 60s, but the prudes tried to make a stand on banning the eroticised display of naked female breasts and the current deal is an idiotic compromise.

but they allow some girl streamers with massive cleavages. at nipples they draw the line.

It's absolutely okay to show scenes of murder, violence, rape, gore and law breaking.

Thankfully American owned companies are doing their best to keep evils such as nipples and general nudity off the screen.

They do have live DJ sets. Another possibility is music.

"Bears" by Void in the Amiga 64KB Intro comp just now was incredible, a true piece of art. This is great!

Six five oh two install gentoo!

Impressed with SmashStash by iNSANE.

Very, very surprising considering the trash that's allowed to stay up on Twitch.

On one hand, I'm shocked that this actually happened, but OTOH, I can't say I'm surprised by this. Companies like twitch have no respect for art and creative expression. Their very purpose makes them incapable of truly caring. They'll impose whatever policies make their business more convenient to run, no matter the collateral damage.

I'm not too surprised given their history of inconsistent moderation and random, secretive bans. I do wonder what the justification was here. They have a section for digital art, game dev/game dev art, and other types of art including traditional. Seems like this would be acceptable.

I have seen plenty of almost naked girls on twitch frontpage. This is borderline prostitution and should have no place on twitch, a platform built for and made popular by gamers. I really hope twitch gets a worthy competitor soon.

it's more like soft porn. and it's not just twitch. youtube as well. tiktok is full of this. they all get many views from this. and of course there is OnlyFans which took it a step further, letting girls get money directly from viewers.

Are “almost naked” women (almost naked girls would be problematic and possibly illegal) playing video games not gamers? It seems to me they are. And since twitch is a platform “built for and made popular by gamers” it seems to me twitch was built for and made popular by people just like them.

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