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