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An insight into live video streaming infrastructure at Twitch

84 points by techPackets 4y ago

EMIRELADERO 4y ago
The entirety of Twitch's git repositories (with commit history even) got leaked a while ago. If this post sparked your interest and you don't have any ethical concerns it might be wise to check them out.
andrenotgiant 4y ago
This reads like a copy of https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/26/ingesting-live-video-streams-at-global-scale/ https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/26/ingesting-live-video-st... with some IVS content marketing slathered on top
- randtrain34 4y ago
  even has the same diagrams
- dt3ft 4y ago
  Blogspam, in other words.
  - techPackets 4y ago
    I wrote the article and I would disagree with you. The article that I wrote is a summary of three blog posts actually a series written by Twitch on their live streaming module. It isn't a copy of just one article.
joebob42 4y ago
I remember when amazon acquired twitch. The fact that aws would offer twitch's video delivery platform never occurred to me, but that strikes me as supremely cool for whatever reason. One random thing I've noticed which jumps into my mind every time I see twitch metioned is that I find youtube's player much better than Twitch's. I'm not even sure exactly what it is I object to about the twitch one, but whenever there is a choice between the two services I prefer the youtube one. Even stranger is that the best player I've personally ever experienced is the one from dood.watch which randomly shows up embedded on shady sites every once in a while. Its weird because I've never seen it used in a non-shady context, and yet it seems to get everything perfectly right: buffering is great, it always perfectly remembers where you are in the video, scrubbing / pausing / etc never randomly breaks it, etc. I'm not sure why it would be the case that this random player is so good, unless there's some weird incentives at play preventing other ones from being as good as they could be.
- _michaelll 4y ago
  One thing that bothers me about the twitch player comparatively, is that YouTube will pause/play when you click the center of the video. Twitch requires you to navigate to a small icon
  - joebob42 4y ago
    I think that might actually be the issue I have with it too now that I think about it.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Twitch also annoyingly darkens the video when it's paused. It's also missing the frame-by-frame keyboard shortcuts that YouTube has (useful when inspecting frame perfect gameplay). I think they stopped adding features in 2015 and it never occurred to them that it might need a change or refresh.
    - avtolik 4y ago
      I was also really annoyed at the darker bits, so I wrote some custom css rules for the twitch site.
    - corobo 4y ago
      It also occasionally has React(?) elements fail to render when you go into theatre mode You can't move the error message without tinkering with the dom in dev tools. Really would be nice if they could focus on the cool stuff in between milking viewers for cash haha
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Could there be a patent involved?
- moritonal 4y ago
  Annoying as it is, a functionally better product isn't necessary desired. Twitch is a "free" product, and it's a complete guess, but I'd imagine they add slightly more friction to consume content in order to make them feel more engaged.
Thaxll 4y ago
Not a single mention of ffmpeg, I assume they heavily relied on it until hardware encoder/decoder took over?
sylware 4y ago
Their web interface should use the <video> and <audio> HTML element pointing to an URL any noscript/basic (x)html browsers could pass to an internal or external media player. In case of non-live streaming, in the URL, seeking should be provided by standard URL fields (total time/and start time/maybe speed x0.25 for fancy), that to allow independent media players to know how to seek. I think apple HLS has standardized that.
potamic 4y ago
Anyone else thought this was super light on details? My only takeaway was that they replaced their edge HAProxy with a custom proxy to do more intelligent load-balancing across data centers. Feels like a lot of text to describe this.

84 points by techPackets 4y ago

The entirety of Twitch's git repositories (with commit history even) got leaked a while ago. If this post sparked your interest and you don't have any ethical concerns it might be wise to check them out.

andrenotgiant 4y ago

This reads like a copy of https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/26/ingesting-live-video-streams-at-global-scale/ https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/26/ingesting-live-video-st... with some IVS content marketing slathered on top

randtrain34 4y ago
even has the same diagrams
dt3ft 4y ago
Blogspam, in other words.
- techPackets 4y ago
  I wrote the article and I would disagree with you. The article that I wrote is a summary of three blog posts actually a series written by Twitch on their live streaming module. It isn't a copy of just one article.

joebob42 4y ago

I remember when amazon acquired twitch. The fact that aws would offer twitch's video delivery platform never occurred to me, but that strikes me as supremely cool for whatever reason. One random thing I've noticed which jumps into my mind every time I see twitch metioned is that I find youtube's player much better than Twitch's. I'm not even sure exactly what it is I object to about the twitch one, but whenever there is a choice between the two services I prefer the youtube one. Even stranger is that the best player I've personally ever experienced is the one from dood.watch which randomly shows up embedded on shady sites every once in a while. Its weird because I've never seen it used in a non-shady context, and yet it seems to get everything perfectly right: buffering is great, it always perfectly remembers where you are in the video, scrubbing / pausing / etc never randomly breaks it, etc. I'm not sure why it would be the case that this random player is so good, unless there's some weird incentives at play preventing other ones from being as good as they could be.

_michaelll 4y ago
One thing that bothers me about the twitch player comparatively, is that YouTube will pause/play when you click the center of the video. Twitch requires you to navigate to a small icon
- joebob42 4y ago
  I think that might actually be the issue I have with it too now that I think about it.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Twitch also annoyingly darkens the video when it's paused. It's also missing the frame-by-frame keyboard shortcuts that YouTube has (useful when inspecting frame perfect gameplay). I think they stopped adding features in 2015 and it never occurred to them that it might need a change or refresh.
  - avtolik 4y ago
    I was also really annoyed at the darker bits, so I wrote some custom css rules for the twitch site.
  - corobo 4y ago
    It also occasionally has React(?) elements fail to render when you go into theatre mode You can't move the error message without tinkering with the dom in dev tools. Really would be nice if they could focus on the cool stuff in between milking viewers for cash haha
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Could there be a patent involved?
moritonal 4y ago
Annoying as it is, a functionally better product isn't necessary desired. Twitch is a "free" product, and it's a complete guess, but I'd imagine they add slightly more friction to consume content in order to make them feel more engaged.

Thaxll 4y ago

Not a single mention of ffmpeg, I assume they heavily relied on it until hardware encoder/decoder took over?

sylware 4y ago

Their web interface should use the <video> and <audio> HTML element pointing to an URL any noscript/basic (x)html browsers could pass to an internal or external media player. In case of non-live streaming, in the URL, seeking should be provided by standard URL fields (total time/and start time/maybe speed x0.25 for fancy), that to allow independent media players to know how to seek. I think apple HLS has standardized that.

potamic 4y ago

Anyone else thought this was super light on details? My only takeaway was that they replaced their edge HAProxy with a custom proxy to do more intelligent load-balancing across data centers. Feels like a lot of text to describe this.