Streaming - What is it?

[Canada EH]

I dont know what it is, but the term is thrown a lot in the forums.

[NavyCuda]

If I were to hazard a guess, it's when the stream misses the toilet or urinal.

[ForumTryhard]

1 minute ago, NavyCuda said:

If I were to hazard a guess, it's when the stream misses the toilet or urinal.

interesting....

[Guest]

stream of a river

[Canada EH]

I knew that would come up.

Just now, NavyCuda said:

-snip-

 

See how easily I blend in and assimilate. Snip snip snip snip snip.

[minibois]

A stream is a constant flow of content. What this content is, depends on what they mean.

 

Livestreaming:

Streaming video (and audio) to a platform like YouTube or Twitch.

 

Game streaming:

Streaming the video (and audio) of a videogame from one platform to another. People for example have their PC upstairs stream the game to a tablet or not as good PC downstairs, so they don't need to be behind their PC to enjoy the power of it.

[Canada EH]

Who holds onto and stores the content, Youtube or the Youtuber?

[Sir Asvald]

2 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

Who holds onto and stores the content, youtube or the youtuber?

What do you mean? You can stream any game you like. You can also do a podcast.

[Canada EH]

Well I meant for video.

Quote

Livestreaming:

Streaming video (and audio) to a platform like YouTube or Twitch.

 

Gaming I understand because I play that online game World of Tanks on the PC. Its updating every couple weeks and takes about 10 minutes to do so. I havent thought about network streaming games or anything else, within the house.

[minibois]

9 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

Well I meant for video.

 

Gaming I understand because I play that online game World of Tanks. Its updating every now and then and takes about 10 minutes to do so. I havent thought about network streaming, within the house.

When doing a livestream, you send data from your PC to YouTube's or Twitch's servers. You are recording you PC's screen for example, the softwares encodes that while you're recording and sends it to YouTube/Twitch for them to display the content on their website.

[NavyCuda]

Think of streaming like a radio broadcast, the content is live.

[Canada EH]

Ok makes sense now, I just thought storing all that crap would cost Youtube a bundle, they would compress it then.

[manikyath]

4 minutes ago, Minibois said:

A stream is a constant flow of content. What this content is, depends on what they mean.

see it like the "stream of water" in a river.

 

in the tech world, the broad term "streaming" means that the end user does not need to receive all data before the media can be used.

example:

- youtube videos are technically also "streaming" because it doesnt need to download entirely before the content can be watched, it only sends the pieces you're looking at, at the moment you're looking at (including a butter, to avoid chugging)

- spotify has a large music library on their servers which you can listen to, when you listen to a song it doesnt send it entirely on one go, but it just sends bits and pieces as you're listening.

 

since the rise of gamestreaming, the word streaming has kind of turned into the meaning of "livestreaming" which, as you guessed, is the same principle but instead of having the content on a server, the content is sent to you "live" -- as it is actually happening.

[SLAYR]

It doesn't have to be just youtube/twitch, steam has in home streaming, but shares the same concept or sending data, to another system, in chunks to reduce latency, and so the whole video doesn't have to be uploaded to whatever is playing it at once.

[Canada EH]

That is gunna be my next project, in home streaming of Steam games, then TV networked Android TV.

All very interesting stuff. Server's scare me though.

[SLAYR]

48 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

That is gunna be my next project, in home streaming of Steam games, then TV networked Android TV.

All very interesting stuff. Server's scare me though.

You don't need a server for the in home streaming, you can pick up a steam link for $35USD on sale, or just install steam on any other computer on the same network, make sure in home streaming is enabled on both computers, login to that and the host computer at the same time, and on the client computer it will have stream option where the blue play is for games.

 

A LAN connection is almost a must though, due to latency and packet loss, unless you have extremely good wifi.

[LogicalDrm]

10 hours ago, Canada EH said:

Who holds onto and stores the content, Youtube or the Youtuber?

Neither by default. Since streaming is moving content data from point A to point B, neither service stores anything but some buffer. You can set your PC to record content locally. And same settings can be found in streaming services options. But since data takes storage, they don't have that on by default. Most people who stream don't really have need for it anyway.