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My Twitch Live Coding Setup

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Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#2

Post by rovyko »

The original article is really interesting. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lessons-from-my-first-year-o...

I didn't even know livestreaming code was a thing aside from pre-scripted tutorials. I'll have to watch one of the streams, because the hands-on nature is probably good for learning the quirks of various techniques that you don't get from programming books.

It's too bad I spend 80% of my development time reading documentation and chasing down bugs.

Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#4

Post by keyle »

I did live coding on twitch back a year or so ago, for about 2-3 months. It was nice to get a bit of company working from home on my own sabatical (aka. financial dive) year.

Overall though I don't think it's worth it. You get the usual lurkers that come say hi, and then a bunch of drop-ins that have language questions, stackoverflow type questions, or start rambling about technological choices which eventually distract you from your burning floor todo list staring back in your eyes as deep as the abyss.

Fun though, but counter-productive.

Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#5

Post by minimaxir »

The real problem with typical Live Coding setups is that the text size is often way too small. You have to massively increase the size of the font or zoom the UI so that it's readable for the users, especially those who are viewing the stream on mobile/a small subwindow (one unintended perk of the Electron-based IDEs is that changing font/UI sizes uniformly is easy to do).

I strongly disagree with streaming at 720p30: the low resolution combined with what's said above makes it very hard for the viewers . As long as your upload bandwidth is sufficient (>6 Mbps) and your computer processing power is sufficient (quad-core CPU), I do recommend 1080p60 for future-proofing. Your viewers can lower the quality if necessary, and the exports to YouTube maintain 1080p60 as well. (EDIT: Maybe not: transcoding is apparently not always available for smaller channels, so bandwidth for users can be a concern)

It's worth noting the Streamlabs Alerts are just HTML, and as a result supports as many CSS hacks as you want (e.g. fonts/sizes/colors)

Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#6

Post by xpaulbettsx »

minimaxir wrote: post #5

The real problem with typical Live Coding setups is that the text size is often way too small. You have to massively increase the size of the font or zoom the UI so that it's readable for the users, especially those who are viewing the stream on mobile/a small subwindow (one unintended perk of the Electron-based IDEs is that changing font/UI sizes uniformly is easy to do). I strongly disagree with streaming at 720p30…

There's zero reason to run 60FPS for a text editor, turn it down to 15FPS and take that extra bandwidth and put it into quality - if you're worried about the YouTube quality after-the-fact, you can run two encoding jobs though it's a bit rough on your CPU

Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#8

Post by minimaxir »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #6
minimaxir wrote: post #5

The real problem with typical Live Coding setups is that the text size is often way too small. You have to massively increase the size of the font or zoom the UI so that it's readable for the users, especially those who are viewing the stream on mobile/a small subwindow (one unintended perk of the Electron-based IDEs is that changing font/UI sizes uniformly is easy to do). I strongly disagree with streaming at 720p30…

There's zero reason to run 60FPS for a text editor, turn it down to 15FPS and take that extra bandwidth and put it into quality - if you're worried about the YouTube quality after-the-fact, you can run two encoding jobs though it's a bit rough on your CPU

Double-checked: Twitch does say transcoding is "as available" for non-partners: https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2785927-join...

Hmm, I could have sworn that I had the options available when watching smaller channels, but they may have been Partners.

> There's zero reason to run 60FPS for a text editor

It does make things surprisingly more fluid, especially for window navigation/scrolling (although you get into the 30fps vs. 60fps debate). If you're using a webcam that also does 60fps, it makes it consistent too.

Re: My Twitch Live Coding Setup

#9

Post by minimaxir »

jaequery wrote: post #7

I don’t know why streaming can’t be a simple one click process. If anyone ever tried to configure OBS, you know what I mean.

There are tools like XSplit which make the process simple. Of course, said tools are Windows only, since the target audience is gamers.

If there's enough of a market for simple code livestreaming, then the multiplatform tooling will follow. (or someone could fork OBS like what Streamlabs did and strip down the features).

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