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A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

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Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#31
post #15

I spent some time live-streaming a (now dead) project this year. I live-streamed almost all the dev and created an archive indexed by commit ( https://ctzn.network/dev-vlog ). Here are some other non-technical tips: - Don’t livestream everything like I did. You’ll burn out. But do pick a regular schedule like once a week and stick to it. You’ll eventually get regulars and that’s fun. - Use a service like Placeit and…

I livestream a subset of my work on Asahi Linux [1], and I agree with almost everything you said and add: - Read the chat, at least on and off. It also helps if you have friends who will ping you via an (out of band!) notification if someone says something important. I use both IRC and YouTube chat, and the IRC folks know that if they tag my name there I'll actually get a beep in my headphones and notice. - Get used…

> Audio quality matters. A lot. It makes the difference between a coding stream people will leave running even if they aren't watching the screen, and one where they'll get tired quickly. You don't need expensive hardware. Just a decent (vibration isolated!) mic mount and a cheap dynamic mic will do (I paid $3 for mine at a junk shop) - and processing. EQ, gate, compressor, maybe some multiband gating or compression (I use that as a trick to hide fan noise).

Essential advice. Took me a full two weeks of setup and experimentation to get voiceover audio I was happy with. If you’re new to recording or live-streaming, highly recommend you set aside a similar chunk of time to get that right.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#32

> So, what did I do? I switched from Logic to Reaper for my live mixing. Reaper is very cheap ($65, and you can just use it for free if you want), extremely streamlined (it weighs about 35 MB to Logic’s many GB), and has worked perfectly for me. I haven’t had one bad moment with it. It’s what they’d call robust. I’d recommend it for this purpose to anyone. Guess who created Reaper? Justin Frankel. Guess what else he…

What GUI library, if any, is used by Reaper and Winamp? Or is it low level graphics code?

I feel like that's the biggest hurdle; you can get web developers by the dozens to craft specialized UIs, but any native GUI will be Windows only, some Mac but only because they're familiar with iOS, QT but they're likely a dying breed, etc.

I don't feel like there's a strong alternative to cross-platform webapps (in electron) at the moment.

That said, I do strongly believe that any serious company (think Slack, Discord, Spotify) has the financial resources available to create native applications for all platforms, with a web based version on top. The issue there is that it's really hard, if not impossible, to get a consistent style on all native development platforms; the designers will insist on their company wide design standards / language.

Therefore, native GUI toolkits should allow for the flexibility of web/CSS styling.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 is not a multiple of 30. >and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

No, the fact that higher frame rates are not automatically better because "bigger number, more data" is not equivalent to Stockholm syndrome. What's better, a gallery exhibition of 20 photographs or 2000? It doesn't work that way. 24fps is not a bad framerate.

It's not a bad framerate in itself, but it's an unwelcome one when it has to be shoehorned into a 50 or 60 hz display. It just doesn't update evenly.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 is not a multiple of 30. >and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

No, the fact that higher frame rates are not automatically better because "bigger number, more data" is not equivalent to Stockholm syndrome. What's better, a gallery exhibition of 20 photographs or 2000? It doesn't work that way. 24fps is not a bad framerate.

highly anecdotal, but 24fps tends to give me a headache. It's just ever so slightly too slow, bordering on "slide show".

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 is not a multiple of 30. >and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

No, the fact that higher frame rates are not automatically better because "bigger number, more data" is not equivalent to Stockholm syndrome. What's better, a gallery exhibition of 20 photographs or 2000? It doesn't work that way. 24fps is not a bad framerate.

Sorry but thats the worst reasoning i've ever heard when it comes to this FPS debate. 24fps is a bad framerate. Even for movies with the "prerendered motion blur", which helps to smooth the video a bit, its a stuttering mess. Comparing it to watching static photographs makes no sense, an inherent quality of video is it not being static. Don't forget that 46 fps was determined by Edison to be the minimum viable framerate to not cause eye fatigue but then it was decided to go down to 24 to lower the cost of movie productions. 24fps is literally just the low budget option. The higher the fps the smoother the video the better the video. I'd pick 720p60fps over 1080p30fps any day if im somehow limited by bitrate restrictions.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 is not a multiple of 30. >and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

No, the fact that higher frame rates are not automatically better because "bigger number, more data" is not equivalent to Stockholm syndrome. What's better, a gallery exhibition of 20 photographs or 2000? It doesn't work that way. 24fps is not a bad framerate.

24 Hz is not necessarily a bad frame rate (depends for what, really), but even disregarding that most display technology is for 30/60 Hz, I don't think there is any argument that 24Hz is not worse than any higher framerate in terms of visuals. Just like 60 Hz is worse than 144 Hz or even higher rates. The difference is very noticeable.

What's worse, how do you intend to display 24 Hz content on a 60 Hz monitor for example? Display one content frame on every 2nd or 3rd monitor frame? That will lead to speedup / slowdown. Maybe display one content frame every 3rd monitor frame, but drop every 6th content frame? That will display the content at proper speed but the result will be a jerky watching experience. Maybe think about interpolating the content by computing in-between frames dynamically? I'm not sure to what extent this is done in existing devices, but I'm positive the watching experience won't be optimal.

If it was somehow proven that the human perception system "samples" individual frames at a fixed framerate of 24 Hz, then you could make a case that 24 Hz is preferable to 30 Hz, but I'm pretty sure that is not the case.

I remember playing Halo on the original Xbox. I was distracted for weeks because it was an unpleasant jerky experience. About once per second there was an annoying jerk when just walking in a straight line. At some point I noticed that on a friend's Xbox Halo ran very smooth - at least during scenes that hadn't a lot of action going on. I was already considering that his Xbox was a newer, stronger model, but then I noticed my friend had his Xbox set to NTSC mode. I'm from Germany, where as most of Europe the usual video system was PAL (slightly higher resolution and running at 60 Hz instead of NTSC which runs at 50 Hz). I set my console to NTSC for Halo and it fixed my issue. The whole thing might be an issue in Halo's engine, maybe they weren't able to fix this in time before the release. Or I don't know, fixing it might have caused huge headaches with multiplayer. In any case this situation might illustrate why you don't want to put 24 Hz video on a 60 Hz screen if you can have 30 Hz video.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#39
post #15

I spent some time live-streaming a (now dead) project this year. I live-streamed almost all the dev and created an archive indexed by commit ( https://ctzn.network/dev-vlog ). Here are some other non-technical tips: - Don’t livestream everything like I did. You’ll burn out. But do pick a regular schedule like once a week and stick to it. You’ll eventually get regulars and that’s fun. - Use a service like Placeit and…

> I had someone try to send a Twitter reset code with the goal of getting me to show the code on the video.

Wow -- that seems like it would be a very low risk/effort for pretty decent chance of success attack. Experienced streamers will likely have all notifications for stuff not directly related to their stream turned off anyway, not just because more security awareness but also because it's a distraction; but does anyone know if less experienced people get regularly caught out by this?

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