Why does Twitch Limit video quality to Source for small streamers

[Stillie]

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?

 

[HDS]

Are your friends partners? Only partners get auto trans coding, i.e the option to select low/med/high.

 

[Diesal]

"Non-partnered channels or channels that just don't have enough viewers will only have one URL in the response, channels that are partnered/have enough viewers and are transcoded will contain URL's for "Source", "High", "Medium", "Low" and "Mobile" quality levels."

> https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/question-about-quality-of-video-source-medium-and-other/457

 

[Stillie]

nope, do you HAVE to be a partner???

 

[agentrfr]

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.