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by dddanmar 3232 days ago
100% - the delay is as low as I can get it.

Twitch uses RTMPE for the most part, it's always going to be a little delayed. It's a decent box, compression is on, connected to fibre internet.

If anyone has any ideas of reducing latency I'd love to hear it!
6 comments
MichaelGG 3232 days ago
Why not time dilate? Could make it a variable setting that users can control. At some setting, it'd be fast enough to send commands and win fights without god mode.

Or you could execute the command for a second, then pause the game execution. Make it closer to turn-based Doom.

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sli 3232 days ago
Allowing a reasonable number of consecutive actions might help, too. Like if I want to go forward two steps and turn 90 degrees to the right, I could send "wwddd." Not as necessary in Twitch Plays Pokemon, but could do wonders here.

But as mentioned, it would have to be capped to some number to prevent abuse.

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maccard 3232 days ago
No agfiliation, but Mixer/Beam [0] had a much lower delay than twitch. It unfortunately has the issue of not having anywhere the popularity of twitch.

[0] https://mixer.com

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narrowtux 3232 days ago
Mixer also has the possibility to add buttons directly to the stream, so viewers can use WASD and stuff on their actual keyboards.
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PhasmaFelis 3226 days ago
Just to piggyback on this--a friend of mine lives across the country and I've been wanting to watch her play games and kibitz like we used to, but we can't find any video streamer or screencaster that doesn't have either ~10sec delay or unacceptably awful video quality. We've tried Twitch, Skype, and Steam streaming so far. Any ideas out there?
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detaro 3226 days ago
As someone mentioned below, https://mixer.com/ seems to be the current king of low-latency, but it seems like they only allow public streams.

And Discord just rolled out a beta for screen-sharing, also something to keep an eye on maybe.

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spyhi 3232 days ago
Does the irc bot you imported use websockets? I've been researching how to do a Twitch-plays game in Unity/C# and am thinking websockets to avoid rate limiting, but was wondering how much that'd do for latency, given it's push-based instead of polling.
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dddanmar 3232 days ago
You can take a look at the code on Github, it's a very straight forward Python IRC client.

The delay experienced is all in the stream broadcast back to the Twitch servers and on to the viewers.

When I'm watching the chat and also watching the local view of Doom the commands are executed almost instantly. It then takes ~8s to show on my Twitch view. When I started it was around 15s but some tweaking in OBS has brought that down a bit.

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exikyut 3232 days ago
Oh wow. The 8 seconds is Twitch?! Yikes.

I am unfortunately completely ignorant of how you actually send data to Twitch, but can you use H264? It has an "ultra-low latency" mode.

Edit: Hmm, you're on OBS. Maybe you could stream using some uncompressed low-latency option from OBS to ffserver, then reencode on ffserver to low-latency H264. Alternatively, you could use ffmpeg with its X11 capture option, pointed at eg Xvfb.

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wcummings 3232 days ago
The delay is lower for "partners" on Twitch I think, so they can technically support it, just not for every stream.
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