ADSL2+ and Twitch Streaming

I have a couple of Twitch streams that I frequent, and from time to time I've noticed lag / stutter with them at source speeds.I figured that 10 Meg (my general connection speed) should be adequate, but not so.To be pedantic, my speedtests tend to be 9.5 Meg to 10 Meg.

Here's a look at the TBB monitor in action with 'Source' bit-rate (unknown with specific stream, but probably 900 x 60 or 1080 x 60), 720 x 60 and 720 x 30 - Linky 1

I found it odd that the middle speed registered a lower load on the connection, albeit sustained, rather than bursts.The source speed bursts in that pic are about 10 Meg.

So I decided to try the old SNR to 3dB to see if I could squeeze some more from the connection. The pre-tweak sync was 11,975Kbps, and after tweaking it rose to 13,335Kbps. Running the same tests again, I got this - Linky 2

The source bursts are closer to 11.3 Meg or so, and it seems I have gained a potential 1.25 Meg increase. Yet again, the middle speed of 720 x 60 was sustained and low, but then rose and started bursting. The best thing is that the lag / stutter on source speed seems to be far less. My best guess is that one should have a realistic minimum BB speed of 12 Meg for 900 x 60 or 1080 x 60 to get the best experience.

Pings to TBB since SNR tweak are unchanged - Linky 3. Not sure of the best place on Twitch to trace. live.etc is not responding to ICMP.

Strange that the TBB speedtests are still in the 9.5 Meg to 10 Meg range. Not sure why, and the file downloads are similar - Linky 4. The tests are standard TBB, then standard 50MB file, standard 100MB file, then port 81 50MB file.

For those on ADSL2+ and under 12 Meg, a little SNR tweak might alleviate some of the stream issues. I really should upgrade to FTTC, but until 1080 x 60 streaming, I've not needed it.

As twitch streaming is LIVE encoding the bit rates are higher for similar quality and frame rates compared to Netflix et all

Guess is the broadcaster is using their GPU to encode as it can chew a CPU encoding at high bit rates

Well go figure this. Watching another LIVE stream right now (UK streamer on Twitch) and at 1080 x 60, the DL speeds are ranging from 4 Meg to 6 Meg.

Without knowing all the details of how they are encoding difficult to say much

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Well go figure this. Watching another LIVE stream right now (UK streamer on Twitch) and at 1080 x 60, the DL speeds are ranging from 4 Meg to 6 Meg.

Its Twitch at fault, my Infinity 4 has issues buffering, stuttering etc when watching US Streams and also US Live Streams, UK Streams are fine.

I can also see that Twitch just stops sending me the stream most of the time, where as I can watch sever 4K YouTube Streams at the same time.

I reported it to Twitch Support and basically got a non US user we don't care type of response, which is a shame due to most of my US friends Twitch Stream.

Paul

I've found Twitch a strange beast to watch. I have 5 browsers installed on my laptop and very often have to take pot luck which one will work. More often than not the video streams just don't get sent.

But, here's the thing. I just went to Twitch in Opera with the VPN set to a US IP address, and everything just worked. Coincidence? Maybe, who knows..

Was it the east coast of the US by any chance?

The way I think Twitch works is when you are streaming to Twitch it will use the closest server with the lowest latency.
So if you are streaming from the UK it will pick a server close to that.

Now when you watch a stream Twitch will tell your browser what server has the stream on it, so your browser connects to that server to get the stream.

Most is not all the streams I watch that are from the US are from the West Coast, around 156ms to 200ms latency for me.

The streams from the UK play flawlessly with no drops nothing, now streams from the US I either get dropped frames or it will play for X time and then just stop sending me the Stream.

The largest size of data Twitch sends me is about 11 Mbps and that's for a 1920x1080@60fps, there is noting stopping Twitch from sending me more data.

I can see this being an issue for live streams from the user due to higher latency.

At this point I am unsure which side is stopping the stream being sent, it might be Twitch thinking I have gone or got too far behind, or it might be my browsers, but surly it wouldn't be all browsers because its happening on all browser I have tried and that's including the Twitch Desktop App.

Paul

Can't say I've had browser issues, other than FF with the flash plugin issue of high CPU usage (not a Twitch-specific issue).

Using Opera, and all streams are good, other than the bandwidth issue.

I think the streamer with my issues is from Canada, but he may be based in the US, or using US servers. I tried another UK stream last night and again while the stream was 1080 x 60 the bandwidth was only 3-4 Meg. I'm sure there's a bitrate factor happening there, but am not too savvy on the bitrate / encoding systems.

I have a feeling that the UK Twitch servers probably don't cache streams from abroad (the non-live vids of streams are just as heavy as live streams). All that data on that distance must have an overhead.

Or maybe it's the specific streamer's encoding not up to date.

Latency is a joke on twitch, since chat can be 20 to 30 seconds behind the video leading to confusion for all and wrecking interaction with hosts at times

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Can't say I've had browser issues, other than FF with the flash plugin issue of high CPU usage (not a Twitch-specific issue).

Using Opera, and all streams are good, other than the bandwidth issue.

That's interesting: I'm having issues with 1080 60fps Youtube vids using Firefox on Linux - audio plays fine but the video freezes and drops a large number of frames in order to keep up with the audio. 1080 25fps and 30fps Youtube vids play fine though with no frame drop. Manually selecting 720p as opposed to Auto 1080 60fps playback is the workaround, obviously not ideal since I don't have a bandwidth issue.

For what it's worth, tonight's LIVE stream from across the pond was lagging at 900 x 60, but fine at 720 x 60. Kicked up the meter, and realised the DL speeds were hopping between 3 Meg and 6 Meg, but TBB speedtest was 10-11 Meg.

Reboot router, still with 3dB set, and slight drop of sync speed, but it seems to be working. I wonder if it's a Plusnet routing or gateway thing. Anyway, here's the 900 x 60 meter readings. Pretty constant at around 6 Meg.

Linky

Not sure about Plusnet and throughput speeds etc. but I did find the other day that both cores of my cpu were running at a constant 50% when playing a 720 60fps Youtube vid. With 1080 60fps both cpu cores were peaking at more than 90% and there were problems with serious frame drop although the audio played OK. The video was uploaded by an American user - not sure if that is relevant?

Doesn't seem to be (for me in this case). CPU at 10-20% across all four cores.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Doesn't seem to be (for me in this case). CPU at 10-20% across all four cores.

We can definitely rule out a cpu issue in your case then

What I do with Youtube 1080 60fps stuff is download the vid with a Firefox extension and play it offline with VLC media player without any issues - can not do that with live streams though.

I had to dump FF. CPU and RAM usage was crazy high - http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/f/4562654-f...

Firefox 55.0.2 (64-bit) seems OK on my Ubuntu 14.04 OS, only issue is the 1080 60fps Youtube playback thing. However I did find Chrome to be best with XP but I don't boot into that OS any more and go online.

Try out a VPN maybe? Not sure if it'll help. Tunnelbear might be a good place to start. I think you get a free gig from them so plenty to do some testing.

Grave-digging a little but for what it's worth, last night / this morning I watched a bit of a stream, then watched the rest over video. The odd thing was that the video stream on the latter would blip-lag every 7-8 seconds, so I tried the pop-out player, which as far as I know takes away chat, fave streams and all the other little windows and notifications.

See the early bit and compare to the latter on my BQM - https://ibb.co/iyJyNH

I guess it might be the live vs vid factor, or it might be Twitch vs Twitch popout, but either way, the latter was lag-free. I have toyed with the idea of a 3rd party stream tool, but we'll see how the pop-out player does first.

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Oh, and for what it's worth Linus Tech Tips used to be sponsored by Tunnelbear, but recently shifted to 'Private Internet Access', due to McAfee acquiring Tunnelbear. See vid as to their reasons:

https://youtu.be/RNG4-9BqUIQ