Twitch buffering

[Jaffakeik]

It's just a question, nothing that really bothers me.
But I noticed that streams that use 1080x60fps and 6k bitrate+ Are buffering for me. I got 62Mbps. So what kind of speed do I need to watch all quality option without buffering? I thought somewhere was written to watch 4k movie u need 50Mbps, but how it's 1080px60 more demanding than 4k? Coz I got no problem in watching 4K on youtube.
If anyone could explain me this in simple terms?

 

[Solaris17]

If anyone could explain me this in simple terms?

The YouTube server is closer than the twitch server to your house.

 

[Jaffakeik]

My closest twitch server is London, and closest youtube server is Belgium or finland whoever is closer. So I dont think its the case.

 

[_UV_]

2 things cause this kind of problems:
- how far you from streaming server and how far streamer
- how capable streamers hardware with today software (i'm starting to see so much topics about buffering and encoding speed problems with OBS last month)
If the problem persists on every translation - it's yours, if not - streamers.

 

[Solaris17]

2 things cause this kind of problems:
- how far you from streaming server and how far streamer
- how capable streamers hardware with today software (i'm starting to see so much topics about buffering and encoding speed problems with OBS last month)
If the problem persists on every translation - it's yours, if not - streamers.

Not to mention appliances the company drops off in the ISP network, how many transit providers it needs to go through, how the route is setup between host and consumer. How much bandwidth the ISP allocates for transit from that provider, how much load is on that node, how much load is on the node of the consumer, how that traffic is prioritized.

EDIT: and lest we forget, the streamer himself might have upload issues.

But he wanted simple, and didnt think "that was the case".

 

[Bill_Bright]

The YouTube server is closer than the twitch server to your house.

how far you from streaming server and how far streamer

It may seem counterintuitive, but distance isn't really a factor. Data flies through wires and satellite bounces at near light speeds. If unhindered, light could circle the Earth 7 1/2 times in 1 second.

The bigger (smaller?) bottlenecks are the actual performance of the servers/data centers of the providers, the number of hops (very important) between the two distant ends, and your ISP service and their servers. Also, the number of users streaming that same video at that moment can affect the buffering too.

And oddly, the number of hops is not necessarily related to distance either. There could easily be just one hop (or satellite bounce) between New Your and Los Angeles, but several hops between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

 

[Vya Domus]

the number of hops is not necessarily related to distance either.

Sure it is, try pinging a site from China and compare the average amount of hops with what you get from Los Angeles. There is a direct correlation between distance and number of hops, with the only exception being over the ocean transmission which typically counts as one hop even though the distance is massive.

 

[Kursah]

A quick Google for "twitch 1080p 60fps stutter" found a lot of results of folks complaining about this very issue, some with 200+ Mbps connections that are testing at their provisioned speeds. @Jaffakeik what steps have you taken to diagnose the issue at this point?

Did you verify your ISP download speed is achieving close to the 50-60Mbps mark? Even so, many streams only need 10-20Mbps, but as said above if there's something hindering speed, latency, or is a potentially bad route, that could hinder your ability to receive consistent and stable packet traffic from a remote source. But I would expect worse results than stuttering on 1080P60 streams. There are some major CenturyLink outages/issues going on since yesterday, not sure if that's an issue in your area or not (not even sure they're a provider on your side of the pond), but it surely is in mine. More for clients than myself as I use Charter.

Anyways, I did some quick sleuthing of my Google results and found some things to try, not sure if you've tried them or not. If you have, let us know the results please.

Some suggestions that worked were:

• Turning off hardware acceleration in Chrome.
• Trying Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi being Chromium-based though may still exhibit the issue, I haven't seen it yet.
• Using a different app to capture streaming seemed to be a popular one (streamlink + VLC for example).

 

[Bill_Bright]

There is a direct correlation between distance and number of hops

Gee whiz. Did you notice I said, "not necessarily"? That means "not every time". And you even gave an example proving my point!

So to reiterate the point more specifically this time, the distance between the YouTube sever and the OP's house, and the Twitch server and the OP's house does "not necessarily" impact the buffering. It may be the number of hops in between, or the performance of the servers on those distant ends.

Considering Twitch is owned by Amazon and YouTube by Google, I think it safe to assume both have multiple mirrored data centers scattered about the world, including in the OP's geographically small UK. So again I say it is more likely the number of hops rather than the distance affecting his buffering.