Question / Help Stream disconnects often

vopeju

New Member
Hi.

Got some problems. My stream has remarkably fluid quality. Sometimes it stays up for hours, no problem. Sometimes it goes down once or twice in that hour, which is annoying, as it splits my twitch archives (seriously, why does the local recording reflect connection drops and/or how do I disable that? That's dumb as hell, and the main reason I save a local file is so that I have a record that isn't at the mercy of my connection). Sometimes, like tonight, the stream can't stay up for more than 30 seconds, which is quite annoying when you just wanna play games. =/

I can't narrow the problem down. I'm stuck trying to stream over wireless (yeah, it sucks, but there's nothing I can do about that). My ISP is wow (formerly knology) and I have no idea if it might be a connection problem either. Finally, twitch is twitch.

so yeah. that's the general situation. I don't expect anyone to magically solve this with the flick of a switch, but more direction on how to go about testing stuff would be really awesome. I don't really know how to diagnose possible network problems.

other notes:
-I've tried keeping bitrate low. this does help, some (I used to get interference with my headset; suppose I could still be getting interference with something else but I changed the band the computer was on). But once it's under a certain point (generally 300-400 kbps) lowering it further doesn't make disconnects any less likely on some nights.

-I can't really tell what other settings might be affecting it. I've tried keeping low latency mode on and off, bitrate spikes way more depending on setting (which is probably bad) but eventually the kbps streamed display crawls back down to 0 before the beep.

-Dallas and/or alexandria secondary seem to consistently be the best ingest servers, although when the problem really gets going no twitch server is immune (some nights I went through and exhaustively tried every single US server).

any thoughts, or settings that could mitigate the impact of all this crap?

http://speedof.me/show.php?img=130926161405-17414.png
log: http://pastebin.com/PR5vQHni
 

Lain

Forum Admin
Lain
Forum Moderator
Developer
The local recording and connection are linked - a pretty bad design flaw that will be fixed in future versions.

Wow, you stream at a.. reallly really low bitrate. I'm surprised you're able to stream with that much at all, I tried it one time and it looked really bad. The problem with low bandwidth connections is that the connections typically tend to be more unstable. More problems tend to happen when you have less bitrate to spare than when you have more. It seems like you've tried everything you can already, I'm not entirely sure what else to suggest unfortunately.
 

R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
Try a wired connection, wireless is susceptible to interference which causes connection drops.
 

vopeju

New Member
re: low bitrate: it looks about as bad as you imagine (although it's passable for simpler and/or older 2d games). funny thing, raising the x264 preset actually has a pretty noticeable visual effect when it's this low.

re: local recording: cool, glad to know it's in the pipeline. Sorry if I sounded angry, I was really frustrated last night.

I've definitely thought about just trying it wired, but the problem with that is I either have to buy a 30ft ethernet cable and stretch it far enough for everyone to trip over it, or temporarily set up shop in the middle of a room on the other side of the house, and then move my desktop back after a couple hours, and I'm lazy. I guess it would be nice to know for sure though.

thanks for your time!
 
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