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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

This may be anecdotal but Twitch is an example of a service that just bloody works. I've been a user for awhile and I've yet to notice any noticeable service disruptions or issues. They were also one of the largest early adopters of EmberJS, pretty sure it was well before the 1.0 release when many bugs were still being worked out and the API suffered frequent changes, so hats off to the engineering team for continued awesome work.

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Twitch has a fairly high number of outages, although not all affect video playback (eg API outages). Most recently the whole site was down for about an hour from EU due to a botched CDN setup. I have a status tracker that monitors from four locations, https://twitter.com/TwitchStatus

I'll always be a little bitter about their VODpocalypse and retroactively muting streams with copyrighted music.

Software should serve people and they eradicated countless memories/achievements, eliminated a priceless historical record.

I don't mean to diminish how untenable the previous situation was, and I'm sure I'm underestimating the difficulty/cost of what they ended up doing. I appreciate their work, engineering, and use the service regularly. But it's an "Our Incredible Journey" part of their story and I don't want to let them off the narrative hook for it. They made ~$1b on this content, after all.

Maybe if you have fast internet connection. I'm on a HSDPA+ connection and Twitch is unusable, not even the VODs. Then again, Youtube and Vimeo is pretty much the only sites from which I can watch video streams smoothly.

What's your location? I've found the same - I can stream HD on Youtube gaming without an issue but not anything better than Twitch Medium. Sometimes I need to downgrade to low or mobile quality to keep up. I figured it was because of my location (not EU or NA).

I'm curious, have you tried viewing the streams or VODs through an alternate player?

I've found that I can almost always improve the smoothness of their content by using Livestreamer[0] to play it in VLC (or Kodi, more often)

[0]: http://docs.livestreamer.io

I use this on my netbook. Pretty much unwatchable otherwise

It doesn't have anything to do with the topic. It's quality of their network or quality of yours that is the main reason here. Not software.

Mind sending me details? I can be reached at tarrant@twitch.tv. Information that can help are things like who your ISP is, what your specific IP is, where you are located. Possibly a traceroute to live.twitch.tv.

We really do care about the QOS of users and are constantly working to improve service to users everywhere in the world. Sadly there are many constraints out side of our control that can cause bad service. The information our users are kind enough to provide to us can often help us identify problems and reduce issues.

The video service almost always works. The website has issues pretty regularly.

I've never successfully watched a video on Twitch. I get a black rectangle with playback controls, and when I press play, nothing happens. Disabling AdBlock doesn't help.

You have flash allowed on all domains without click to play?

I don't have Flash installed at all. Does the site require Flash?

If so, then that's news to me; other video sites that require Flash usually a) show a "you need Flash" message in the place where the video whould show, and b) don't show playback controls, because they're part of the Flash component itself. Also, I never saw any mention of Flash in any of the site's help/troubleshooting/FAQ documents.

It requires Flash, but it uses apple HLS.

I think Safari (+iOS) works without Flash, but everyone else is relegated to the Flash player.

Controls arein HTML5, just the actual video handler appears to be flash.

In the past (probably 2? years ago) the entire player including controls was part of flash.

Good to know, thanks.

Since posting my last message, I looked at the documentation on the website again, and saw that it claimed that you could use the site on iOS and Android by just using an ordinary browser. So I tried visiting it in Safari on my iPhone, and the videos worked. Then I tried using Firefox on my Kindle Fire, and the videos didn't work. But they do have a dedicated Twitch app for the Kindle, so I downloaded that. So now I have a way of watching Twitch videos. :-)

The fact that Flash is not mentioned anywhere on the site as being a requirement seems like a glaring omission.

"ordinary browser" = Chrome for Android, latest version, Safari for Mac, Safari for iOS

Firefox does not support HLS in either desktop or mobile version. It requires Flash as a last-ditch fallback on any platform that doesn't support HLS, afaik.

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