Why is streaming quality so limited?

[minervx]

I noticed that on both Twitch and Youtube, quality is much lower than the real resolution.  1080p on stream sites looks more like 600p.  You need 4K to get something that resembles HD. 

 

What is the bottle neck:

* Youtube/Twitch's software?

* Screen recording software not encoding correctly?

* Host not having strong enough CPU/GPU (so they have to turn down resolution and settings)?

* Host not having enough upload speed?

* Wifi not being reliable enough to watch videos on?

[Sakkura]

Youtube/Twitch run a lower bitrate to save bandwidth.

[klutch]

For gaming especially it's the encoding. What you are noticing is the confetti effect. The more details that change with each frame the more pixelated and blurry the resulting video will be. It's especially noticeable in games with moving foliage, grass, trees, basically lots of small things that change from one frame to the other.

 

On a high level encoding works by reusing bits of the image from the previous frames, and if most of the frame differs from one to the other there won't be enough bandwidth to transfer a 25 or even 60 full resolution 1080p images every second. So you end up with the blurry low resolution image you were describing.

 

 

[minervx]

do twitch prime members get better image quality at all?

[KenjiUmino]

14 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Youtube/Twitch run a lower bitrate to save bandwidth.

this. 

 

and it's not just about saving bandwidth on their end.

 

if they would send video in better quality (or unaltered source quality) a lot more people would start complaining that they can't watch anything above 720p because their internet is too slow. 

 

20 minutes ago, klutch said:

For gaming especially it's the encoding. What you are noticing is the confetti effect. The more details that change with each frame the more pixelated and blurry the resulting video will be. 

i wanted to have TV static on my twitch stream when i am AFK

 

 

- it didn't take too long for me to figure out that this was a terrible idea. 

[LogicalDrm]

6 hours ago, minervx said:

do twitch prime members get better image quality at all?

I don't think so. But Twitch partners get more bandwidth on server side than those without partner status.