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Hitbox.tv | Switch from Twitch

B

Busta SMurk

Member
I tried to use this today, it's cool.

But there are a few things that bug me:

I just played like 3-4 hours of DayZ, streamed it all, and after, when I wanted to save the stream as a video, it was already broken into random chunks, 1x 45min, 1x 2:00, 1x 15 minutes, etc...

Why?

And when I try to watch the video, there are ads? dafuq? mandatory ads on video playback?

I like to share videos with friends and stuff, but I'm definitely not a fan of putting ads on anything (YouTube) so this is kinda a bummer. I can continue to capture it, and upload it to YouTube, so it's not a total deal breaker.

I'll try it some more this week.
 
B

Busta SMurk

Member
It's been about a week, so I thought I'd give an update:

Chat:
Chat is pretty broken, although the last couple days it seems to be much better. By chat being broken, I mean that you cant see when people are typing, sometimes refreshing helps, sometimes it doesn't. You sometimes can't see what viewers are writing, and viewers sometimes can't see what others are writing, so it works both ways.


Streaming Delay:
A 5-7 Second delay: Very nice! 'Nuff said. Makes streaming to buddies who are watching and also on comms (voice chat) more bearable. I wish it was less, but I guess due to technical reasons, isn't realistic. When people respond 20-30 seconds after something, it makes it weird, both for the viewer and me. So this 5-7 second delay is pretty dope in comparison.


Ads:
Ad's are still everywhere. Even when you go to edit your videos. I think they need to tone this down a bit. I understand it's a new service, and they are most likely struggling to generate income, but it's a tad excessive.


Editing & Highlights:
A bit buggy, sometimes it includes the entire clip, and not the selection you cropped. Sometimes takes 2-3 attempts to get the right clip. They have a 'Push to YouTube" feature (although I haven't tried it yet) that allows you to sign in with Google+ and link your accounts, and directly put your video's up on YouTube.

I would like to see the ability to create folders/playlists for your archived videos, unfortunately, this is not a feature.


User Interface and Interaction:
A little confusing at first, but it didn't take long, and I really like it now. There's a serious lack of features, and the site is overall pretty stripped down.


Overall Impressions:
I think if they fix chat, some bugs with video editing (including removing the ads you get when your editing a video) it will be a solid alternative. Some of the broken features make it a little frustrating, but I'm sure they will get ironed out soon enough. I like this service, and will continue to use it.

Another note: The community on this site is overall, pretty damn good. I think that is mainly because it's a really small site, and usually there are only one or two streams with more than 25-50 people. It's good exposure for the small guys. There are some bigger streamers who when they come on, get 100+ viewers, which is nothing compared to Twitch numbers, but explosive compared to the rest of the site.

If you are frustrated with Twitch, give this site a try, just don't expect 1000+ viewers.
 
D

dtg

Neo Member
I still can't scroll up and down on the main page. On stream pages there's a little bar. Otherwise, no sidebar.
 
F

Foaloal

Member
I watched a decently popular hitbox stream today, I thought it was pretty enjoyable and preferred it over twitch.

The delay was quite short, and the chat's maturity was much higher than what I see on Twitch streams (likely due to the low number of users).

The video quality seemed a bit low, and I didn't have any options to pick a higher or different quality, but perhaps the broadcaster was just streaming at a low bitrate.

Overall there is still room for improvement, mainly in video quality options and in logging/saving of streams for non-live viewing, but the lack of a major chat delay alone makes things worthwhile.
 
R

ReRixo

Banned
The quality is good, and it looks really smooth compared to twitch, but damn it's so dead. Top stream right now has 32 viewers...
 
G

gogosox8

Member
Signed up and checked out a couple of streams. So far it seems to work just as well as twitch does. So well see.
 
Z

zoobzone

Member
I've tried hotbox.tv before, I'm not sure why but under the exact same settings with OBS, there is audio/video sync issues - no such problem exists with ustream and twitch.

The best streaming site in my opinion is nicovideo.jp, the comments sliding across the screen adds a lot of interaction between viewers.

Best of all, there is only 3-4 seconds of delay between your real time stream and what the viewers sees.

The catch is there is 30min limit per stream, unless of course you spend nicopoints to extend it.
 
M

Metal Gear?!

Member
joe2187 said:
its as simple as choosing Hitbox.tv as your streaming settings in OBS.

I use Hitbox and OBS as a makeshift way of working around purchasing a capture card. Record playthroughs of games and whatnot.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what you mean, you've never needed a "capture card" or capture hardware to record PC gameplay. Consoles, sure. But on PC we have had FRAPS for over a decade and now we have MSI Afterburner and Action and now NVIDIA Shadowplay... and of course OBS as you're using it.
 
C

C.Dark.DN

Banned
I don't guess many people made the switch. The highest view count is 35 with 50% having 1 or 0. Goodness. The guys with 0 viewers have ads. Are they partners? Heh.
 
ebullientprism

ebullientprism

Member
C.Dark.DN said:
I don't guess many people made the switch. The highest view count is 35 with 50% having 1 or 0. Goodness. The guys with 0 viewers have ads. Are they partners? Heh.
Click to expand...

Not surprising. People watch Twitch for the streaming personalities. Not everyone cares about or wants flawless 1080p. The 60 second delay sucks but its not really a deal breaker.

And you would be surprised how much those smilies mean to people.
 
H

_hekk05

Banned
Stream is shitty if you live in Asia. Same as twitch unfortunately. Niconico and ustream still the way to go in Asia.
 
D

Dreams-Visions

Member
Looks nice.

Will keep an eye on them. The quality of these streams is exceptional, but that's easy to pull off when nobody is watching. Will they be able to retain this quality if they start getting moderate traffic? I guess we'll see.
 
Sanic

Sanic

Member
They should pay some popular streamers to more over, though I don't know if they have enough capital to lay out for that.
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
Looks cool, I'll definitely sign up and try my luck on them. I haven't had any real problems with twitch... but my inner hipster wants to move on.
 
G

goldsoundz

Member
The chat delay is a real bummer for certain streams on Twitch, and like others have said, a little competition is certainly not a bad thing. There are certain days that Twitch just wants to act like a piece of junk and constantly buffer every 5 seconds.
 
N

Nokterian

Member
goldsoundz said:
The chat delay is a real bummer for certain streams on Twitch, and like others have said, a little competition is certainly not a bad thing. There are certain days that Twitch just wants to act like a piece of junk and constantly buffer every 5 seconds.
Click to expand...

To me it got worse after there update. I mean i have very fast internet and it couldn't play any streams properly. I know twitch is populair but what there doing in the background is just bad. Even MLG has a better stream then twitch.
 
I

InfiniteNine

Rolling Girl
Actually remembered to set this up today and tested it out with a friend and the lag is very low. It's been getting annoying that the lag between my chat and my video feed was about a minute apart so this is great for interacting with people.
 
N

Nokterian

Member
InfiniteNine said:
Actually remembered to set this up today and tested it out with a friend and the lag is very low. It's been getting annoying that the lag between my chat and my video feed was about a minute apart so this is great for interacting with people.
Click to expand...

There latest update the delay is less then 2 to 10 seconds that is massive instead of 60 seconds.
 
I

InfiniteNine

Rolling Girl
Nokterian said:
There latest update the delay is less then 2 to 10 seconds that is massive instead of 60 seconds.
Click to expand...

The delay made things awkward when I'd ask people in chat what I should do when games provide a choice since I'd be waiting there for a while before I got my answer then they'd watch me waiting for them to answer.
 
Baleoce

Baleoce

Member
I'm watching a Japanese stream of one of the Oracles Zelda games on hitbox. Enjoying it :) Also, I never thought about this before, but the Japanese version of Text-to-Speech (coming from his commenters) is really good. Text-to-Speech suits Japanese very well. Makes sense I guess, with their phonetic syllabary system being pretty linear in terms of pronunciation. Doesn't have as many random rules to interpret as something like English. Pretty damn useful if you're playing a game on something like hitbox and you can hear your commenters instead of looking at the chat all the time. Almost like they're actually there xD

I'm watching this, btw: http://www.hitbox.tv/minolis2
 
I

InfiniteNine

Rolling Girl
Anyway to make the stream less blocky? I've been messing around with my OBS settings without much luck atm and using the resulting archived videos as a measure of quality with them all pretty much looking the same amount of blocky in high motion scenes no matter the resolution.
 
N

Nokterian

Member
InfiniteNine said:
Anyway to make the stream less blocky? I've been messing around with my OBS settings without much luck atm and using the resulting archived videos as a measure of quality with them all pretty much looking the same amount of blocky in high motion scenes no matter the resolution.
Click to expand...

Did you follow the recommended settings on there website? I never had this problem.
 
I

InfiniteNine

Rolling Girl
Nokterian said:
Did you follow the recommended settings on there website? I never had this problem.
Click to expand...

Actually looking over my last twitch stream of Vanquish I found out my apartments downgraded my internet upload. x: I lowered the settings a bit more and it seems fine but a bit ugly, but I think I'll switch to a paid ISP soon to get around this.
 
P

poopninjamvc3mk

I sucked six dicks to get this tag.
I just hope hitbox.tv actually blows up so then Twitch will have some competition and be forced to improved but that's probably not likely.
 
C

CreepingFear

Member
I'd like to try it out. I even created an account. But I'm hesitant after hearing that the creator of hitbox had a previous site that didn't pay the streaming partners.
 
G

gabe90

Member
Quick question: why are we looking to these startups to offer competition to twitch rather than YouTube? Don't they have live streaming?
 
G

gngf123

Member
gabe90 said:
Quick question: why are we looking to these startups to offer competition to twitch rather than YouTube? Don't they have live streaming?
Click to expand...

Because more competition is always a good thing and if you haven't noticed, Youtube hasn't exactly been welcoming lately. What with endless crazy copyright claims.
 
D

djplaeskool

Member
Going to review the footage and play around with some of the settings.

PSO2 is a very color-intensive game and that can really throw streams off.
I remember trying to livestream Dyad once. that didn't work at all.
 
G

Garteal

Member
Updating PSO2 while looking at your stream. Like DaBoss said, it was very smooth from what I've seen. Quality could be better though, but it's alright for a test I suppose.
Since PSO2 is indeed a colorful game and you're usually in motion, it's a bit hard to get good consistent quality with the h.264/x264 codecs.
 
G

gabe90

Member
gngf123 said:
Because more competition is always a good thing and if you haven't noticed, Youtube hasn't exactly been welcoming lately. What with endless crazy copyright claims.
Click to expand...
Right. I guess my question is why hasn't YouTube taken off as a strong competitor to Twitch in the game streaming scene? Is it really because of the copyright stuff?
 
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