Stream delay

W

wmike

New Member
Spent a lot of time trying to get this to work. Messed around with resolution, CPU usage, etc. It does not matter that my connection is 150mbps. OBS streams with significant delays - to Twitch or Facebook - about 10 seconds. Renders it unusable. I would like to use this - but it doesn't seem up to the job. I can stream directly to Facebook, without OBS. I'd like to use OBS for Twitch but with such delays it is useless.

Pity.
 
wmike said:
Spent a lot of time trying to get this to work. Messed around with resolution, CPU usage, etc. It does not matter that my connection is 150mbps. OBS streams with significant delays - to Twitch or Facebook - about 10 seconds. Renders it unusable. I would like to use this - but it doesn't seem up to the job. I can stream directly to Facebook, without OBS. I'd like to use OBS for Twitch but with such delays it is useless.

Pity.
Click to expand...
A livestream is not a peer-to-peer VoIP call. There is an inherent delay when it comes to an RTMP/HLS stream for HLS chunking, CDN replication, and end-point delivery. 10 seconds is VERY good... the delay used to be upward of 2 minutes at times. This comes down to 'managing user expectations' in short.
If you are streaming to a small group of people, it is much simpler on the back end, can be much more direct and so have a shorter delay.

On Twitch you can enable the experimental low-latency mode which cuts down the chunk size that the player buffers, and can bring the delay down below 5 seconds. However, this may cause unstable playback, freezing, and active buffering instead of behind-the-scenes.
 
10 seconds is fantastic, I'd love such a short processing lag
- Speed of light is not that fast.. really
- your computer has lag time doing real-time encoding (OBS stats window tells you what that is)
- then lag to send to stream host
- then most providers re-encode the video and then distribution as @FerretBomb mentions
a little detail on that re-encoding? H.264 has lower processing requirements, so is a common PC to stream host format. [H.265 being a licensing mess, and AV1 having processing demands beyond even upper PCs]. But H.264 is inefficient in bandwidth, and for large stream hosts that is a show-stopper, so re-encoded... takes time [and possibly re-encoded to multiple formats], then distribution to CDN [more time]. Stream delay on Facebook can vary by watching device, even on same network. Try an iOS, Android, and PC on same network to watch same stream and note delay differences. Then watch over cellular network... entirely possible delay will vary (possibly by a lot) between devices
 
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