Live Streaming Improvements

Hello TWiT Fans,

 

On Thursday, August 29th around 8PM PDT, we will be implementing some streaming changes.

 

We have been making some optimizations to streaming profiles on our Elemental Live streaming system and are ready to roll them out to production streams for feedback.

 

All of our streams will now be in the H.264 "Main profile," which will improve visual quality at the same bitrate. Previously only Flosoft HLS was Main profile.

 

We will also be increasing the bitrate of some of the streams, and adding a few resolutions to our Flosoft HLS Stream. Hopefully this will result in an improved viewing experience for the vast majority of you.

 

If your bandwidth is limited, you may need to watch a lower quality version than you used to.

UStream and Justin.tv will be making transcodes at lower resolutions and bitrates but these will look better than they did previously. Flosoft streams will also have lower bitrate options built in the HLS manifest.

 

If you have an old device, you may have to watch using Ustream or Justin instead of BitGravity. If it is even older you may have issues watching any stream.

 

If this is the case let us know as we may change the BitGravity Low stream back to "Baseline profile" if necessary.

  

For the Flosoft streams, some of our TWiT App developers or users with VLC/Quicktime shortcuts will need to make changes to the app if they hard linked our previous stream names instead of using our manifest file.  Please see the Developer Guide for more details.

 

If you're in to geeking out with specs, there is also a full PDF of the previous and new settings available to download. You can also check out the updated TWiT Live page on the TWiT Wiki.

 

Thanks and we appreciate your feedback,

 

TWiT Engineering