Why does Twitch Limit video quality to Source for small streamers

Stillie

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Hi all,

I have a couple friends who are getting into twitch streaming and for some reason there is no way i can watch them because the lowest video quality is Source and there is absolutely no way i can watch Source on my 4meg line? Does anyone know if this is changeable or something?
 
Are your friends partners? Only partners get auto trans coding, i.e the option to select low/med/high.
 
Last edited:
Twitch wont enable anything other than source unless you have something like 1000 followers + 50 subs or something like that (or you're a partner).

That's because twitch needs to dedicate an incredible amount of processing power to encode the video at four or five different resolutions simultaneously at a pretty high compression ratio / format suitable for online streaming.

If you've ever tried to encode a dvd to something like an mp4 file you'll know it can take up to 4 hours with "losseless/placebo" quality, even if the movie is 1.5 hours long and you have a beefy processor.

Source on twitch is about 500-600kB/s 1080p30, so you're out of luck I'm afraid.
 
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