So, I have an 8megabit upload speed. When I use my capture gear I push out to twitch a little under 720p with a 4000kilobit/s bitrate. I don't have any macroblocking or smearing that I've ever seen. Here's a sample of me pulling from my PC: http://www.twitch.tv/eujin/b/478306871

However, when broadcasting to Twitch through the PS4 itself, even using the "Best" quality options, I seem to see a lot of distortion/macroblocking/etc going on. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this just because of Twitch being hammered right now?

If this isn't a temp twitch thing, then I'm unsure what may be causing it. I can't actually tell what output resolution the PS4 is using, but the only thing I can think of is either A: "Best" is an ultra low bitrate, or B: It's trying to stream in 1080p resolution, which is silly since you don't have any resolution options.

If anyone else has seen this as well/found any solutions, let me know. Thanks.

I watched my own stream on twitch as I streamed it playing Resogun. It looked quite good, some blockiness, but not bad. I have a 10mbit upload speed, but it wasn't using nearly a significant fraction of it.

The PS4 streams at 720p.

I'd heard the max quality was actually 540p, not 720. At any rate it seems like the output is throttled pretty hard by the unit. Aside from the actual bitrate though, I imagine Twitch is getting completely blasted today. I mean, it's not the most stable site even on a good day, so...

@flippyandnod: Hmm... Could you do me a favor and goto Settings > Network > Test Connection? For some reason when I do that on my PS4, it shows an upload speed of around 1500kbps. Where as when I do the same thing on my PS3, I'm getting full speed.

It says 24.6Mbps down and 2.9Mbps up for me when I run the test.

It also says NAT type 2 (woo!).

My PS3 won't be hooked back up until tomorrow so I can't check it the same way.

abara: The PS3 can produce 720p, if it is lower it would probably be twitch knocking it down.

Twitch is notorious for arbitrarily "adjusting quality" no matter how good the source is. No one should be surprised if Twitch is under heavy load right now with creating new users trying out the Share functionality.

I looked, it was blocking up on me in Resogun some when the screen got crazy. Not bad, you could still see every ship, but some got pretty square, no lie. I don't know what to say other than I'm still satisfied with the level of quality.

@flippyandnod: Thanks for reporting back in on this. Seeing as my 8mb/s upload is reporting at around 1.5 on the PS4, and your 10mb/s upload is reporting at around 2.9, I'm going to take that as an inaccurate measurement.

I just tested streaming from my PC, and was having a problem keeping a constant connection at 3000 kbps, which is way lower than what I normally do.

After doing some speed tests, I can seemingly get my 8mb anywhere here in Kansas, but nothing above 1.8 outside of Kansas right now.

This leads me to believe that either A:

The inside/outside Kansas tests are a fluke, and Twitch is just being hammered.

Or B:

Something's going on with Cox Communication's upload pipe outside of Kansas for some reason.

Oh well, No worries then. (Also, for anyone wanting archiving, everything I've pushed out to Twitch has archived fine on my channel, but I did enable the Archive function in channel settings after twitch disabled it by default.)