by [NB: I’ve since added a post on using a relay for Bandcamp streaming]
Charles Shriner and I did our first show via Bandcamp stream last night, and we were generally quite pleased with it. If you haven’t tried it, I’d suggest first taking a look at Jeremy dePrisco’s toe-in-the-water blog post about it before reading on here — I’m going to try to be quite brief. A series of bullet points, really:
- Generally, the quality of the video is lower than it is on Twitch (but see notes below about recommended streaming rates)
- Generally, the quality of the audio is much higher than it is on Twitch. There’s just a lot more detail.
- Like Jeremy, I think it’s great that they require you to test before going live. I suppose that if you’re an angry noise artist whose act consists of dismembering pink bunny slippers while playing drones at jet-engine levels you could probably find a way to show Bandcamp a thing or two by blowing it off somehow, but really, why would you want to?
- There’s still some exploration to be done on livestreaming bitrates and resolutions. Bandcamp recommends 720p video at a bitrate of 25K. We found initially that we were getting moderately frequent buffering from that, and left the resolution the same but cut the bitrate back to 20K. That might not be necessary. When we went live, I noticed that the streaming lag was less, and I wonder if they’re not deliberately making fewer resources available during testing. But to be on the safe side, I made configurations in the ATEM at 25K, 20K, and 15K just to allow for the possibility of bad network weather at showtime. Not sure if OBS gives you the same ability to make presets at different streaming resolutions and rates — the ATEM is really nice that way — but if you can, you probably should, just in case.
- There is a longer delay in the stream than you would get with Twitch — the lag between connection and actual streaming is longer than it is with Twitch, and so is the time between shutoff and disconnection — at least, it is if you’re using an ATEM switcher. This might not be true with OBS used on its own.
- People did not seem to have any trouble handling the mechanics of pay-for-chat. That may be because our final announcements/shilling for the show explicitly mentioned it and warned people about the mechanics. All of that will diminish over time as people get used to the new standards and practices.
That’s really all there is to say. The video will be up soon. And if you’ve got questions about other stuff involved with livestreaming, take a look at these: