Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) public beta

[Gabriel]

Abstract
Adaptive bitrate works by adjusting to each viewer’s network and serving adequately lower quality content to minimize loading and reloading times; read about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming

Opportunity for WpStream clients
– Use up less overall streaming bandwidth as some of your viewers will stream at a lower quality than the original
– Better percieved quality of service for some of your viewers; faster start time and fewer interruptions
– Feature has been used in production by multiple customers during closed beta, since May 2019, with consistently good results

Restrictions, shortcomings, notes
– Feature requires individual whitelisting
– Feature can be enabled for particular channels (i.e. for initial testing) or for all of them
– Only functions with RTMP broadcasting (i.e. OBS, Wirecast, vMix, iOS and Android apps); browser broadcast will no longer be available once feature is enabled for a specific channel
– Only available for horizontal, 16:9 video
– Fast, high and stable upload capabilities to anywhere in the world (i.e. not just your city, country, or ISP) is required to broadcast; if your streams are interrupting right now, ABR will only make them worse
– A recommended encoding profile (i.e. for OBS etc) is to be used; during beta we will not be able to offer support outside the margins of this profile
– The feature is still experimental and may not work under various unexpected circumstances
– We can only offer limited support related to the feature at this time

To apply for the feature, please provide the following information in an email to prerelease at wpstream.net
– Your WpStream account username
– Your website
– IDs of channels for which you would like the feature enabled (i.e list of chnanel IDs, or “ALL”)
– Please confirm you understand Web Broadcasting (i.e. broadcast from browser) will no longer function after feature is enabled for specific channels
– Please confirm you understand this only works well within specified technical parameters
– Please confirm you understand that superior network capabilities are required on the broadcaster end for this to work well

[Gabriel]

Recommended settings for broadcasting

Software: OBS Studio

Video:
Resolution: 480p or higher
Video aspect ratio: strictly 16:9 horizontal (854×480, 960×540, 1280×720 etc)
Video Bitrate: 1mbps or higher
Encoder: x264
Keyframe Interval: 5 seconds

Audio:
Sample rate: 48khz
Bitrate: 128kbps or higher
Codec: AAC

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