Question / Help ~25 second delay on stream, any tips?

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NeverGuess

New Member
I'm trying to stream Dark Souls 2 (not that the game necessarily matters)

My upload speed is pretty low, fluctuating between .5 Mbps and 1.1 Mbps on speedtest.net

Now I have my quality pretty low due to this, yet I still have quite a large delay, around 25 seconds usually.

Is there any options that could lower this? I've looked in the Advanced settings but haven't messed with them as it seems you guys prefer to people to leave those untouched.

Also, another off topic question that I should probably make another thread for: I am also wondering if OBS supports load balancing between 2 WAN connections. I have a router that load balances 2 connections so there some potentially untapped upload bandwidth there though I'm not sure if that's feasible to make use of

Thanks
 
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Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
If you're getting only 25 seconds delay on Twitch, you're doing great.

I don't think OBS has any code specific to load balancing.

In theory you can decrease your delay further by decreasing the keyinterval to even less than the 2 seconds that Twitch demands (for example, 1 second). I've not heard from anyone who's actually tried and measured to see if it had any actual effect though. Note that doing this will to some degree degrade the video quality, longer key intervals are generally better for quality.


The following assumes that by "WAN" you meant "Wireless LAN" or "WLAN". If you actually meant wide area network (and you're doing so in a wired fashion), then feel free to ignore:

I will say that using wireless is a bad idea when streaming, always use wired if at all possible. Wireless is half-duplex and subject to collisions from anyone or anything also transmitting in wireless near you, and collisions are particularly harmful for streams. If you use two wireless connections (like in your teaming idea), make sure the channels are furthest apart possible to prevent collisions, as they normally have overlap, and I think its possible it may just make things worse instead of better. Also make sure all other wireless devices near you are deactivated while you stream, as even routine link-state checks from other devices can create collisions and disrupt your stream. In the end you're better off temporarily stringing a 100meter cable while you stream and then picking it back up when you're done, than using wireless.
 
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Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
For the load balancing question. To my knowledge rtmp uses a single connection. Doing this over two lines would mean you would have to absolutely synchronize them, making sure that the packages still go out and are received by the server in the correct order. Then you have the problem that the server would not accept two ip addresses for one rtmp stream. (Remember, single connection?)
The usual "load balancing" means directing a user to a different server. So for example if twitch miami was on its knees (as usual) new viewers would automatically receive a stream from another twitch server. Same goes for youtube or other stuff. But even then the whole connection now runs over the new server, you do not get one part from here and one from there, unless its a service that uses caching for example, or its a normal download and you use a DL manager that can download several parts of the file.
 
N

NeverGuess

New Member
Yep. Just switched over to Hitbox.tv and it's only ~10 seconds now so it was definintely Twitch. I apparently missed that update where they added delay to everyone.

As for the load balancing, I'm not using any Wireless connections. I have a wired connection to my router which has 2 different incoming lines. I think you are mistaking WAN for WLAN. By WAN I mean the lines from the ISP. So I have 2 different connections (with different IPs) that are handled by the same router, which balances the load based on the usage.

I didn't think it was likely that something like streaming would support having 2 different connections with different IPs but I thought I might as well ask. Most things don't and I think the ONLY thing that I've noticed does is some of my downloads (like downloading games from Steam and torrents)

I assumed if it was possible at all that it would somehow be doable through OBS but now that I think about it, it would have to be the twitch or hitbox server I'm connecting to accepting 2 different IP connections and having some way to treat them as 1 which probably isn't anything that will ever be supported, especially if the protocol the streams use requires absolute synchronization as you say.
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
Twitch goes by the stream key, maybe it doesn't care which IP the packets come from. Not sure, try it and let us know! Even if Twitch accepts it, I would imagine things would get out of order, unless there's some sort of sequence number in rtmp, or unless your two different ISPs have the exact same latency to Twitch.
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
NeverGuess said:
Yep. Just switched over to Hitbox.tv and it's only ~10 seconds now so it was definintely Twitch. I apparently missed that update where they added delay to everyone.
Click to expand...
Yep, this was when they moved from RTMP (which Hitbox still uses) to HLS (which YouTube uses) to save on bandwidth costs. HLS can be offloaded to a CDN server, lowering what Twitch themselves have to serve, while RTMP cannot. I'm certain it's dramatically lowered their bandwidth bills and significantly improved their profit margins.

Really, the most aggravating part of it for me (aside from the enormous delay it adds) is that they continue trying to spin it as 'better for everyone', citing statistics pulled from a short-term Dreamhack test they ran, for support. Conveniently ignoring that Dreamhack is a TOTALLY NON-INTERACTIVE CHANNEL, and if they tried it on any normal, interactive channel before force-rolling it out to all casters, there would have been a SIGNIFICANT negative response. It's dramatically made the Twitch experience worse with almost no counterpoint aside from the financial one that no viewer actually sees.

"This is for the greater good." Bullshit.
 
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