Question / Help Twitch Max Bitrate

Bensam123

Member
So, it's been the unspoken rule on twitch the max bitrate is 3500 or you get a slap on the wrist. I'm curious if this has changed? I've seen a few big streamers streaming at 6.5Mbps and some at 8Mbps... Has anyone heard otherwise?
 

The Dude

New Member
Its the job of those big streamers to stream so they have the privilege to stream at higher bitrates. It is called Twitch partnership. If you have a good amount of followers you can get a partnership so that people can subscribe to your channel for money.

I don't think they changed the 3500 bitrate limit, I never tried but I think they will just limit you to 3500 if you try to stream better.
 

Bensam123

Member
I am partnered. As far as I know, the 3500 bit rate (which wasn't ever hard enforced) was applied to everyone. Other big streamers I've talked to also said similar things, but it seems people are streaming at higher bitrates since the HTML5 player went full on at the beginning of the month.
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
2000kbps is the advised real-world maximum recommended for non-partners, to minimize buffering issues and remain most widely watchable.

The 3500kbps bitrate is the maximum the ingest servers are vetted to handle correctly.
Going past 3500 is not advised, and is "here there be dragons" territory; if your stream starts to screw up, Twitch won't be able to help you until you drop the bitrate to that safe ingest max. So even if you can do it, it's out-of-spec and may screw up badly. It's like one of those yellow speed-advisory street signs on curves. They don't actually change the speed limit, but they're the estimated safe maximum.

Staff have said that the point where you may end up banned as a denial-of-service attack starts around 6000kbps, but it's more or less a danger zone to avoid (highest I ever run is 5mbps, and only for a few specific games that truly deserve it). Past that should be discussed and pre-cleared with Partner Help unless you have at least a four-digit concurrent viewer average.

I am not Twitch Staff. This information is taken from discussions I have had with staffers, posts they've made over the years, but should not be taken as any kind of official communication. As with everything on Twitch, the above may change because it's Tuesday, or someone saw a cat outside their office window.
 

Bensam123

Member
From what I've been told, bigger streamers are actually the ones they don't want streaming past 3500 as it eats quite a bit more of their bandwidth and resources with transcoding. Small streamers don't really matter, especially when they don't have a transcode setting as they don't eat up as much resources as the bigger streamers.

I'm just attempting to discuss bigger streamers no longer respecting the 3500 kbps soft cap or if there is other information now available. This has always been a grey area as there never has been a hard cap (even though twitch has always been able to institute one).

Whether or not above 3500 is a bad idea due to consumer bandwidth limitations is an entirely different thing though.
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
Transcoding isn't going to use more... it's compressing to the same resolution and bitrate regardless of the input source. If anything, it would just end up with a better quality video post-transcoding, essentially similar to the no-cap-card 2-PC nginx setup method.
People watching on Source would indeed draw more resources, but conversely there will be fewer and fewer people watching on Source as the bitrate climbs, and increases the rate of buffering by demanding a better quality connection and good route to the video servers. The question would more be if a larger streamer found a sweet spot where both a lot of bitrate was used, *and* a large number of people would be able to watch smoothly enough on Source to keep with it.

Is there any reason to really discuss it though? If it becomes a problem, Twitch can introduce hard-caps to reject streams above a given bitrate, just like they do with streams whose bitrate varies too heavily, or have the wrong keyint set. Or as a 'soft' method, they could intentionally cause streams over that bitrate to buffer badly (since they're operating out-of-spec), and let consumer demand sort itself out.
 
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