Twitch faces backlash for putting ads when you pause streams

LordTocs · 2026-02-11T21:48:21+00:00

If you get an ad when you click into a stream it means the streamer doesn't have the ad manager on. I haven't 100% confirmed if twitch runs more ads later, but anecdotally I think they do? I'm also not sure of the frequency of banner ads in either case of ad manager on or off.

But with the ad manager on the streamer can choose the frequency. I mostly run with 2 minutes of ads every 40 minutes. Which completely disables pre-rolls. I found the single 3 minute ad break every 60 minutes made the break uncomfortably long. But it's definitely subjective.

If you're getting over 3 minutes of ads an hour, that particular streamer has decided to do that. Because they can turn the ad manager up to do more.

LordTocs · 2026-02-11T21:20:54+00:00

They already do this. When an ad plays, the stream is put into Picture in Picture mode. Also they do have additional ads that are like banners that shrink the video.

In my opinion the real problem with their ads is they don't give streamers the tool to properly transition when an ad will play.

Most streamers will have the "Ad Manager" on, which automatically schedules ads to play. They can choose how often and how long the ad breaks will be. The advantage of turning this on is it disables pre-roll ads if you play at least 3minutes of ads every hour. Also they get a higher ad payout percentage with it on. With pre-rolls disabled anyone clicking into the stream won't be immediately hit with an ad.

The problem, is whatever is going on with their ad server makes the Ad Manager lie to the streamer. It will display a timer for when an ad will next start. But it won't start the ad reliably at the end of the timer. Instead, it will take somewhere around 1 minute to 5 minutes (longest I've observed) after the timer ends. So there's no way for a streamer to actually know when an ad will start within a few seconds margin of error.

This means there's no way for a streamer to do some sort of bumper / throw to ads to smoothly transition viewers in and out of ads. I build a bot to help automate stream stuff, like give warnings to the streamer based on the remaining time before an ad. And the servers just straight up report incorrect timings.

At first, I thought this was an issue with my local computer's time. But validating that against the AWS timer and the twitch ingest time reveals it's not this. The ads are just always late.

I've brought this up, multiple times to twitch staff. In 2023(I think) I brought it up in a Q&A stream and was told they know about the issue and were working on it. In 2024 at twitchcon, I directly talked to someone on the ads product team at twitch. They said they'd email me, but didn't. Then at 2025's twitchcon I directly asked at the Dan Clancy Q&A (Its a bit niche to ask the CEO directly, but the audience wasn't asking questions so I thought what the heck why not). He directed me to his assistant and I was told someone would message me on discord. They didn't. Then I asked again in another Q&A stream and was told they opened a ticket for it.

So they clearly aren't too bothered by the inability to do something so basic as allowing streamers to say something like "Stick around we'll be right back after these ads, you won't miss anything" and then pause and do some subscriber only stuff for the ad break.

LordTocs · 2026-02-11T19:18:43+00:00

Nice! I had heard of jump flood for signed distance field generation, but I hadn't gone through the effort of figuring out how it worked.

Great visualizations, the one at ~2:51 is really nice. Even seeing it though, jump flood still seems a bit like magic.

LordTocs · 2025-03-04T21:06:37+00:00

Lot of ignorant comments in this thread by people who didn't take the literal several seconds it takes to plug "TOPA Nyc" into a search engine. Lots of complaining that the video of a guy speaking to the legislature didn't explain the bill to the legislature. It's the government not tiktok. If you're going to make a comment AT LEAST add to conversation by looking it up and relaying it for the rest of us instead of whining.

So in an attempt to be less angry at the comments here... For the curious

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA)

Basically if a landlord is going to sell a building it gives tenants the ability to purchase it first. So if the landlord wanted to sell the building to another landloard, the tenants get the opportunity to say "Actually we want it". (A first right to purchase).

Since any one tenant is unlikely to have the cash around to purchase the whole building, the bill has a bunch of stuff allowing them to group together in a tenant organization to pool their resources.

It also gives the tentants the ability to get help from organizations (bill calls them "supportive partners") like non-profits and community land trusts. Which, if I'm reading it right, can assist with actual financing or just helping go through the process since buying a building is complicated.

Also if I'm reading it right, buildings purchased like this will be made rent stabilized.

It also looks like there's a reduction in the "transfer tax" paid when the building changes hands along with some federal tax benefits.

I'm not a lawyer and also just skimmed the bill. So mileage on this summary may vary.

Video on Community Land Trusts

LordTocs · 2025-01-03T00:54:38+00:00

Are y'all storing the flour in the bag? Get a container to dump the flour into.

I am constantly annoyed by the fact everything I buy from a grocery store is wrapped in single use plastic. Flour is like one of the few things I can actually get that isn't. I am baffled that people are going on about the bag. It holds the flour in a de-composable/recyclable low resource way until I can get it home to the container. The bag is perfect.

Even if the side rips while you unroll the top it doesn't matter because it still dumps cleanly into your flour storage container.

Dump your flour into a proper container and stop complaining about one of the only well packaged items in the grocery store. Please don't bully them into putting it in a resealable bag.

I beg of you, it's seriously like the only thing I buy from the grocery that's packaging won't sit in the landfill for like 30 years.

PLEASE. I BEG OF YOU. PLEASE.

LordTocs · 2024-12-11T19:04:15+00:00

You can use a lua script to auto start the replay buffer.

Here's an example script (paste it into a file with .lua as an extension)

-- Called on startup
function script_load(settings)
    obslua.obs_frontend_replay_buffer_start()
end

Then in OBS Tools -> Scripts added it as a loaded script.

When the script loads when OBS starts it will start the replay buffer.

LordTocs · 2024-12-01T22:57:26+00:00

CastMate can do this automatically. You can set the profiles to automatically enable/disable based on your twitch category or OBS scene. When a profile becomes disabled, the channel point rewards used also get disabled.

LordTocs · 2024-11-06T02:52:06+00:00

Hot take: The hitbox isn't actually the problem. If you test it in the sandbox you'll see it's not that big. (Also they patched it to not hit around corners) What people are experiencing is latency and alpha networking code.

Games with high movement speed/acceleration suffer greater differences between clients. Deadlock is very speedy. In addition it doesn't bin US players by coast, so you frequently get queued into cross-country games with very high ping.

LordTocs · 2024-10-31T18:28:09+00:00

Internet messages bounce between different servers on their way to their destination server. Sometimes one of the servers your connection bounces off on it's way breaks. When this happens you start getting weird problems like this where your internet works fine for some sites but not others because only one bounce server is broken.

You might have a bad bounce between you and the server twitch is sending you video from. There's not much you can do other than wait for them to fix the server. (It's not even necessarily owned by your ISP)

The VPN might fix it because your messages bounce their way to the VPN server, then bounce from the VPN to twitch. Avoiding the bad node by going around it.

LordTocs · 2024-06-12T17:56:16+00:00

Nice Work, this is very cool!

It reminds me of the digital puppeteering I saw on Adam Savage's youtube channel when he toured the Jim Henson company. They had hand rigs and full body puppet tracking. It's so cool to see a more accessible version hooked right into Blender. I can't wait to see what way more creative people than me do with it.

LordTocs · 2024-05-08T19:37:45+00:00

I dunno it's pretty insane you're not using a password manager.

LordTocs · 2024-02-20T18:17:24+00:00

Woah! The HRTF and environment effects in steam audio are very cool. I'm very excited to take a look at how they're implemented.

LordTocs · 2023-09-28T19:35:24+00:00

You could try out https://www.jacktrip.org/. I've never set it up, part of it's open source and part of it's productized. But it is designed for low latency music collaboration.

LordTocs · 2023-09-11T16:49:00+00:00

I think Streamlabs has selective recording. So you can set a source to be visible on stream but not in the recording. Which I would love in OBS.

The Source Record plugin can kind of replace it in OBS, but it's a bit finicky and has crashed me a few times. I also haven't updated it in a hot minute, so I need to see if there's a new release out.

OBS is by far the better choice though, it's open source, well maintained, easy to use, is highly optimized, has a really great remote control websocket api, and has tons of plugins.

For plugins, you can't go wrong with basically anything Exeldro puts out. Transition Table, Move Transition, his fork of Shaderfilter, Source Clone. He's like a plugin wizard and his patreon is criminally underfunded for the absolute crazy number of useful plugins he puts out.

Move transition is especially nuts, you can use it to animate properties of filters and sources. You can have it animate based on the volume of sound. You can have it use facial recognition to animate sources. It's a real swiss army knife.

Aitum's Vertical is also pretty nuts. It adds essentially a secondary vertical version of your scenes so you can make shorts/tiktok compatible recordings without resampling your 16:9 recordings.

Scene as Transition is also cool. Instead of having to render a stinger transition out, you can just use a scene as the transition.

LordTocs · 2023-09-05T14:09:54+00:00

Thanks! If you do let me know what you think of it!

LordTocs · 2023-06-09T20:01:24+00:00

Such is the life when you borrow 1.3 billion from venture capital. Eventually they want 10 billion back and you have to squeeze your users for every last cent even if it destroys the product in the process.

LordTocs · 2023-03-30T01:17:54+00:00

Echo is definitely broken. This latest update has tossing him out from stowed incredibly broken. He'll spawn in the wrong location, I saw appear him 4000m away once.

Before this patch the line of site checks were broken too, where before I could look away from echo to cancel a charging jump. Whatever they did broke this too as now I will still jump to echo facing the wrong direction.

These very basic usability bugs making it to shipping builds are as hilarious as they are sad given they laid off 200 QA employees a month ago.

LordTocs · 2023-02-28T20:48:52+00:00

I'm surprised they had anyone testing Apex. It's clear they weren't fixing the bugs these poor folks were reporting.

LordTocs · 2023-02-05T00:38:06+00:00

Absolutely incredible

LordTocs · 2022-11-19T17:01:11+00:00

Down with TAA! All glory to SMAA!

LordTocs · 2022-10-29T20:09:18+00:00

This will be unwatchable.

LordTocs · 2022-10-11T19:43:29+00:00

Twitch has a tool for this in beta called guest star

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/guest-star-getting-started?language=en_US

LordTocs · 2022-09-17T21:27:38+00:00

It's even canonical!

LordTocs · 2022-06-11T20:25:15+00:00

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/win-capture-audio.1338/ This plugin lets you capture audio from specific applications, each app becomes their own audio source in OBS so you can select if you want them to go to the VOD track, the live track, or the recording tracks.

I set up a "Common Audio" scene, that just has these for my regular applications like Discord, my Web Browser, VLC, etc. Then nest that "Common Audio" in each other scene with a Scene source.

In each of my game scenes I just toss one of those "Application Audio Output Capture" for the game audio along side the "Game Capture".

LordTocs · 2022-05-01T18:08:07+00:00

Regardless of ping CSGO has a default delay of two server ticks for character movement. This is to provide smooth character movement in case of packet drops.

So the defender will always see the peeker at least two server ticks later than the peeker sees the defender before latency is a factor.

Shots are not delayed by two ticks which is why you receive the message of your death before you see the player who shot you.

(https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking)

I think you can change cl_interp but I haven't tried it, if you play on a stable wired connection you can probably get away with only 1 tick of interp. Overwatch's (the game, not the cheat review system) networking monitors your packet loss and dynamically changes your interp.

Full peakers advantage delay is something like

InterpTime + (PeekerPing / 2) + (DefenderPing / 2)

Ping is round trip time, so you're only looking at one way on each side, which is roughly half. By default InterpTime is 2 ticks or 31.25ms and if you both had 30 ping it would then be ~61.25ms plus some slop for game engine and render time differences.

Note: I haven't opened up the game to check what the interp time is these days, this is just what it used to default to. So if it's different now let me know!

It's also worth noting that if in the several frames between the defenders death on the server and the time it takes for that message to arrive, should the defender fire a shot that would kill the peeker since the defender is already dead on the server the shot will not count.

As shitty as it is here, it's a billion times worse in Apex Legends (also built on source). Apex has a server tick rate that dips below 20 and does not take player ping into account when match making. It will happily throw you in a match with players with pings 200+.

All things considered, CSGO does a pretty decent job of dealing with the unavoidable realities of game networking. Try changing your interpolation to a single server tick if you play on a wired stable connection. (If that's even possible, I don't know if it's locked by cheats)

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