Will someone tell me if my Twitch stream is smooth?

http://www.twitch.tv/djhicks

Please. I'm not advertising. I don't know if other people can watch it. I have great connection so it isn't a problem for me.

Seems ok

Looks fine from my end.

I'm not seeing any problems. Seems fine.

Awesome, thank you. I'm broadcasting 1920x1200 at 10Mbps and I wasn't sure if it was too much.

Works on my end, but not a lot is currently going on.

@audiobusting: True, I'll play UT3 later and see if that's a problem. Thanks.

Runs smooth as butter on my end.

@mannymar: Nice, thanks.

@djhicks1 said:

Oh, wait, you're broadcasting at 10Mbps? A ton of people aren't going to be able to watch that. I used to broadcast at 4000 Kbps and pretty much every stream I'd have at least a couple people tell me the stream was choppy, even though I never dropped any frames.

@ajamafalous: Isn't 10Mbps better than 4000 Kbps? Am I missing something?

@audiobusting: @ajamafalous: It's variable so it's only hitting 10 in really intense stuff. 10Mbps is way better than 4Mbps, but people have to have a connection fast enough to stream it. I tested streaming UT3 at 5, 10 and 15Mbps and found that 5 looked like garbage, 10 was okay, and 15 was good. If I were broadcasting at 720p, 5Mbps would be fine. But 1920x1200 requires a lot more bandwidth to look good. I know I'm cutting off a lot of people keeping it at 10Mbps, but I prefer quality over viewers. Plus, everyone here said they could watch the stream fine. When they eventually provide automatic transcoding to everyone this won't be a problem. I have a fiber connection so I could send it out at 25Mbps then.

@audiobusting said:

10 Mbps is 10,000 Kbps.

The issue is not that 4000 couldn't keep up with the upload, the issue is that a ton of people didn't have 4,000 down to watch it. 10Mbps is expectingfar, far too much from your viewers. I know the 1080p/60fps stream sounds and looks awesome (it sure was enticing for me, too, when I first started, and my first handful of streams were that quality), but the issue is that nobody can fucking watching it.

I doubt they'll provide transcoding to everyone anytime soon. It would require significantly more resources on their end, and twitch already ranges from spotty-as-hell to straight-ass in quality for non-partners. I get fucked on about 60% of my streams because there's always a Dota/League/whatever tournament going on, and even though I range from 30 to 100 viewers, I'm not a partner, so they divert all their bandwidth to those other huge streams to keep up.

Ultimately, the decision is up to you, obviously. My suggestion is to bite the bullet and drop it to 720p(or 766p or whatever 16:10) and 60fps so that you can drop your bitrate to 5000. Keep in mind that almost nobody is going to fullscreen your stream (twitch user statistics say something like 75-80% of people don't fullscreen so that they can use the chat), so that extra quality is being completely wasted on those that can use it while alienating those that can't.

@ajamafalous: Points taken. I'm hoping the whole Xbox One deal is going to provide them with enough exposure and revenue so that they can improve their capacity. I like the service so far.

@djhicks1 said:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. Unless they do some serious upgrading between then and now, their infrastructure is going to come crashing down when that thing launches. They are the biggest game streaming service right now and obviously just got a huge exclusive contract from Microsoft; it's frankly unacceptable the amount of technical issues their site and service suffer from.

Also, there's going to be a hell of a lot of streams with ~3 viewers.