Twitch and the Constant Bitrate battle

Hello guys.

I'm hoping I can get a little insight into what is going on as clearly this is an issue with Twitch and their service.

First, my issue is that my streams were looking very choppy. I decided to have a look around all sorts of settings and being new to streaming, I discovered what is called the dashboard on Twitch. When I stream, I now use the dashboard to help me keep an
eye on comments. I noticed something strange here. It was giving me a yellow flag that states acceptable. Apparently, when I stream, I don't have a Constant Bitrate (CBR). At first I thought "this can't be. I live in a 30/5 Mbps down/up stream. I stream at
the recommended 2500 Kbps which translates to about 2.5 Mbps. That's half of my total bandwidth." Clearly I couldn't be doing something wrong. Xbox Live ports are forwarded in my router, my Xbox lives in a DMZ, and I have all of my QoS settings turned off
because this seems to cause more issues than it solves in my opinion.

Now, in doing some research I discovered that Twitch requires you to stream in a CBR rather than a Variable Bitrate (VBR). When I look at the yellow flag error code I notice two things.

1. My average stream bandwidth is about 2.4-2.5 Mbps. This might sound good at first but that's an average. That means that I'm not getting a bitrate consistently higher than 2.5 Mbps.

2. It also points to a max stream of about 4.5 to 4.8 Mbps.

As far as I understand from my poor lowly internet research (LOL) CBR gives you a preset bitrate that your clients (viewers) need to match. Since not everyone can match a bitrate for a 1080p stream and since there is no downsampling done on Twitch's end
on our streams, Twitch made the choice to let us stream at 720p at different bitrates. This makes it easier on the end user in the long run but has also created a deeper issue for those of us too cheap/poor to afford elgatos.

If Twitch allowed a VBR for us on Xbox through their app, those with fluctuating bitrates could still sustain good image quality. The downside here is that there would have to be buffering at the beginning of your stream which would add delays and is the
main reason Twitch wants CBR instead since that is just parsed directly as is to your viewer.

I'm sure my ISP (Time Warner Cable) is to blame here. For as great as their service may be (not really) they rely on the short bursts their customers get at times. Try uploading to youtube. You can see where I'll hit the mythical 5 Mbps or higher at times
in the speed rate but if you have a diagnostics open, you can see file transfer speeds in real time and it's not pretty. You're really uploading chunks of information with a huge disparity in size. 538 bits here, 1458 bits there (figuratively of course).

As far as solutions, I have tried lowering the bitrate all the way down to 800 Kbps. That is the only bitrate that allows me to keep an excellent rating according to Twitch. Any higher and you get a really choppy picture as you play. Here's a highlight I
uploaded to Pay attention to how grainy the video gets when there is a lot of motion. This happens because at the time this was happening, my upload speed was not in a burst where I needed
at least the 2500 Kbps or more. I may get high rates but not very often as it seems.

Now why is this important. I could care less about the choppy video. What I care about is the fact that Twitch limits your audience to just PC users, cutting you off from mobile (where a lot of people watch) and especially from consoles. That's where it
hurts because for me, my target audience are the people watching from their consoles wondering whether the game they want to buy is fun. If I can't achieve a CBR like Twitch wants, they essentially cut me off from the people who are more likely to watch me.
People on PC are going to focus on those streaming at 1080p most of the time. I can't compete with that. My market is the other Xbox One users and the 360 users who can't find me.

I ask you now fellow reader, is there an answer to this dilemma? Am I to just give up? I can't get a better internet service. Time Warner has shut out all of it's competitors in my area other than AT&T. They don't even have U-Verse here yet. So, it's either
terrible ADSL or the worst broadband in the world. Should I just give up?

Let me know your thoughts on this and if there is any way around the CBR thing that I may have overlooked. Thanks in advance guys.

:)

 

Problems with Broadcasting on Twitch

I have the same problem (Excellent stream quality drops to Acceptable) and the same sort of message on my Twitch dashboard:

Max keyframe interval is currently at 10.007 seconds. Please set it to 2 seconds.

The broadcast is not set to constant bitrate (CBR). [Current average: 2483 kbps, current max: 4868.98347521 kbps]

I can't find any way to adjust this setting in the Xbox One network setting menus. Is there any fix for this that Microsoft recommends? Can the bitrate even be set?

 

Microsoft acquires streaming service Beam

twitch will remain on top. Youtube offers a much better streaming service than twitch allowing you to put high ass bitrate for great quality, yet everyone is still on twitch.

 

I would love it if someone from xbox would/could help with this.

 

I'm going to bump this again now that someone else has seen it. Still having an issue. I've learned that it's not my internet. The app is creating a lag between my Xbox and twitch somewhere. Even switching to the lowest quality possible doesn't help. My
average eventually gets below the low quality threshold. How else is this happening when my average is always way higher than the next step down?

 

I'm having the same problem as well.. wish someone could figure this out... i usually start a stream in "excellent" then after refreshing every so often it drops down to "acceptable" 7 mbps upload.. twitch app always recommends 2500 kbps which i believe
is the highest xbox can go.. someone please help us!

 

Hey there mayhem2186!

Please go ahead and create a new thread if you haven't already. This way you can receive support specifically tailored to you. Be sure to include the details of the issue as well as any troubleshooting steps that you have tried. Thanks in advance!