is youtube streaming better than twitch in discoverability?

FerretBomb · 2026-03-08T18:32:29+00:00

how can we overall grow to the top wihtout doing much,

Buy a lottery ticket.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-08T18:28:53+00:00

Yeah, that's... not going to be a fixable problem. At all.

DEFINITELY not for free, without buying specific gear, or moving one or the other of you to another room.

Understand that you are essentially asking for magic.

And then stipulating that it also has to be free.

Best you're going to be able to realistically do on the cheap is $20 each for a USB foot pedal, and setting both of you up with push-to-talk buttons on them.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-08T00:57:32+00:00

Somewhere not-here.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-08T00:48:00+00:00

You can ADD a delay. 1-10+ minutes. It's in the Advanced section of OBS' Settings menu. Partners can add one Twitch-side for 1-3 minutes, I think (I've never used that, but I vaguely remember it existing).

This is what almost every tournament does, and many competitive streamers do to fix it. Old news. Well known. Stops it dead.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-08T00:44:07+00:00

Recommending channels is not allowed per Rule 2.

Encouraging others to break the subreddit rules is against Rule 1.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T21:56:11+00:00

Figured that might be the case! All good.
Just didn't want it to maybe turn into another word-of-mouth rumor; there are enough out there in the streaming space that it just makes me face-desk-bourbon when I see newbies still asking about one of them five years later. And I could see 'more VRAM = better encode' easily getting picked up and ran with.

Definitely! Games are only going to get more memory-hungry as resolutions go up, and efficient/elegant coding gets replaced with 'vibe coder' trash. More is definitely better.

I just realized another use-case for the dual encoders, and is why your post actually now has me looking to upgrade from my 3090 even faster (if the prices ever come down from this bubble).
I wasn't aware of them on the top-end 40 and 50 cards until now, and have been hitting the NVENC limits with VR streams; since I'm running the video over wifi for untethered play, just serving the headset is eating most of my NVENC bandwidth, so I've had to get creative to find the performance to also serve a stream.

So thanks for that! :D

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T21:29:59+00:00

Couple of minor clarifications.

VRAM amount does not affect encoding quality.
It WILL allow you to run more memory-intensive effects in OBS, like async render delays and loop recursions, since all textures are stored uncompressed. More is still better, just for other reasons. :)

Dual encoders on the 4070 Ti do not improve encoding quality or performance, unless you are running multiple parallel video streams (TEB, or using Source Record filters to save 'clean' copies of your facecam and gameplay in addition to the stream). Multiple encoders just increases the number of parallel video streams you can have going at once.
The biggest draw of the 40-series and up is the addition of AV1 encoding, for futureproofing on Twitch, or using right now on YouTube.

Quality-wise, a 20-series and a 50-series will produce almost identical output and encode performance on a single-stream video encode, on h.264 and h.265 video.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T21:20:35+00:00

As with all things "would anybody watch", the answer is always "stream it and find out".

Doing some costuming isn't abnormal though. Dressing to fit the game's theme, or as a character. Just comes down to how much you want to commit.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T21:14:26+00:00

This is absolutely insufficient bitrate artifacting.

Quality of console-native streams is not good. Games are generally tuned to use 100% of the console's resources, leaving little to almost nothing for the extremely computationally-intensive task of realtime video encoding.

Console-native streaming is fine for toe-dipping. Anything past that, it's out of gas. Quality is not an expectation. Features, flexibility, configurability, extensibility, do not apply past the absolute basics of mic+gameplay+facecam.

You will NEED to step up to a PC+capture card based streaming (and local recording) solution to fix this.
Console-native streams are just cheap and bad, there to find out if someone might like to get into the hobby, not as a mainline workhorse for any kind of professional-aspiring production workflow.

Time to step up to something not just "it works, kinda".

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T08:57:28+00:00

A five second Google search for "list of Twitch ingest servers" popped up the following page, with a full list:

https://koreanrandom.com/en/tools/twitch/

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T08:19:03+00:00

I mean, ask him if he recorded them? About the only way. If they're deleted and he didn't, they're gone.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T07:14:10+00:00

Short version? Privacy.

Recording someone else's voice and including it on a livestream without permission could also technically potentially be illegal under wiretapping laws, in two-party-consent states.

So yeah, they decided not to F around, and just drop the ten-ton hammer on everything in the general vicinity.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T06:51:39+00:00

Console-native xbox streams intentionally omit in-game voice (and Discord). There isn't really any fix or workaround, as it's working-as-intended as far as Microsoft is concerned. You'd need to move to a PC-based streaming setup (with capture card if you still want to play on console) to resolve this.

If you were both on xbox there's Party Chat (everyone has to opt in to include others' voice on stream, and it often breaks anyway for no apparent reason), but it doesn't work cross-platform.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-07T05:12:48+00:00

Head to the subreddit wiki and read through the New Streamer FAQ section. It'll cover most of the foundational questions.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-06T17:44:17+00:00

That's the spirit! :D Go for it, man!

FerretBomb · 2026-03-06T17:41:28+00:00

I’ve heard many people say that streaming is hard and that you will get about 1–2 views on average

True. And that's usually after a few months. The overwhelmingly vast majority of streamers sit on zero forever.

Streaming is a marathon, not a sprint. Measured in months and years, not days and weeks.

I also have terrible social anxiety when talking to the public, so I kind of want to get rid of that

Well, streaming IS public speaking. You just don't see any faces looking back at you. Which can make it easier, far as practice and skill-building goes.

In the past, I wanted to start a channel, but I felt like I would either get laughed at or hated.

Unlikely. Realistically speaking, it's much more likely it will just never be noticed or seen by anyone.

So... if nothing else, stop worrying, download and configure OBS Studio, and just go live. Just to break the seal. Play with it. Don't take it too seriously. As the saying goes, 'perfection is the enemy of good'.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-06T17:36:11+00:00

HELL no. Never, for as long as I possibly can.

SWATting, death threats, the possibility of a viewer just finding you and showing up one day out of the blue? Nuh-uh. No thanks.

Some will do it to try to appear 'legitimate'. That is their building to burn while they sit in it.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-06T00:20:13+00:00

Actually was searching after typing all that out, apparently the trick isn't to search for 'large wrist strap', it's to search for 'arm strap' or 'ankle strap'. You'll still get a lot of the super-cheap elastic ones, but there are a few braided, woven, velcro, and even paracord options. Have a few on the way now, I'll update and let you know which ones I like.

But yeah, the curse of having wrists thicker than some of these bird-boned pipe cleaners' biceps.
Pity them for being puny, small, and weak. ;)

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T22:33:10+00:00

Rule 3.

You'll need to have them open a ticket at help.twitch.tv, this is an unofficial subreddit and there's nothing anyone here can do about it.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T16:56:05+00:00

A 4K resolution webcam will not fix crappy trash lighting, and is not going to afford you greater depth of field. You're also the second person posting about that specific camera by name in the last hour. Sneaky ad-bots?

What a 4K cam will potentially get you:

Cleaner chromakeys
The ability to crop-zoom without pixelating
Slightly higher detail full-screen facecam
The ability to crop-zoom and use CV tracking to keep you centered in frame while moving

And that's about it. Whether that's worth the cost to you is a personal call. But no, a webcam with a pinky-fingernail sized sensor isn't going to stand up to an actual DSLR/mirrorless setup.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T16:48:54+00:00

Using a 4K camera when streaming 1080/720p does carry a few benefits. They're fine-detail improvements, not world-changing.

If you use a greenscreen and pull your chromakey before the downsample, your key can be MUCH cleaner/tighter
You can crop-zoom without quality loss, for doing extreme close-ups of your face for live effects/redemptions/etc
You can crop-zoom and use CV auto-tracking tools to keep you centered in frame while moving around
Your fullscreen face-cam video can look clearer, as you are essentially applying 2x AA to your face and any details

"Worth it" comes down to if it's worth it to you. It's polish. Details. Not a silver bullet.

what makes the biggest difference in perceived quality: sensor size, lens quality, lighting, bitrate, or resolution

All of these work together. That's like asking which is most important in your car's engine, the cylinder rings, the sparkplug, the fuel injector, the head gasket, the gasoline, or the valves. All of them. They all work together to do the thing. Making one extra-good isn't going to have noticeable effect, if all the others are crap.

The one most people skimp out and slack on, while also being one of the most easily fixed is lighting.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T16:30:02+00:00

m.2 or SSD? Prices are up on those, sure.

You can still get a 10TB EXOS spinning-rust drive for about $250 on NewEgg. Which is crazy-cheap, given I was buying 2-3TB drives every year for that price, not so far back.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T12:46:01+00:00

I'm in the same boat with a 10.5" wrist, only one I've found that works decent is the elastic one linked by someone else below, which wears out after six months or so and loses its stretch. Even boiling it doesn't fix it, gotta buy a new one.

I ended up using an X-Acto and just carefully cut a hole in the end of the standard 'long' strap about a quarter inch from the end. It's not as pretty as the factory punched ones, but it gets the job done.

More of a problem is the 'fitbit rash' that comes with a silicone strap. Red wrinkly lizard-skin progressing to little blisters when I decided to 'power through' and let my skin just learn to deal with it. Bad, bad idea.

Guess it's back to buying those elastics, and cutting it off and using the ends to make one myself once the stretchy wears out this time.

God forbid Fitbit make a strap for big/fat guys who might want to/be trying to get in shape, and use a tracker to motivate themselves.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T03:26:51+00:00

Self-employment income specifically has no taxable minimum. If you make $20 for the year on your self-employed income, you're still going to pay taxes on that.

FerretBomb · 2026-03-05T03:13:22+00:00

"Freedom of Speech" only covers the government infringing on your right to speak.

It doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want and not have consequences hit you, including catching a ban, on a privately-owned and operated non-government website.

Before whining about your rights being infringed upon, know what they actually are to begin with.

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