🦀Convenience Thread🦀

[Mark]

Welcome all! No action is required on your part to enjoy convenience.

CURRENT TOPIC: What are some conveniences you refuse to break away from as there is no convenient alternative?

[Mark]

CURRENT TOPIC: What are some conveniences you refuse to break away from as there is no convenient alternative?

I'll start. For me, a big one is Spotify. I know @rejectconvenience is a big physical media and MP3 enjoyer, but I am big on the convenience of Spotify.

[Rain]

Discord, specifically for low-latency live streaming. I still haven't found any good alternatives that let me stream my desktop audio and video in real time on Linux.

[Mark]

Discord, specifically for low-latency live streaming. I still haven't found any good alternatives that let me stream my desktop audio and video in real time on Linux.

What's your usecase? Just being able to stream things to friends? Tabletop gaming?

[Rain]

Discord, specifically for low-latency live streaming. I still haven't found any good alternatives that let me stream my desktop audio and video in real time on Linux.

What's your usecase? Just being able to stream things to friends? Tabletop gaming?

Mostly streaming video games with friends. We usually talk over Signal but the screen share was choppy and the audio didn't seem to come through, same thing with other video conferencing software we tried (Jitsi, Matrix). We also considered PeerTube for general live streaming but the latency isn't ideal for games where you need to react quickly.

[Mark]

Discord, specifically for low-latency live streaming. I still haven't found any good alternatives that let me stream my desktop audio and video in real time on Linux.

What's your usecase? Just being able to stream things to friends? Tabletop gaming?

Mostly streaming video games with friends. We usually talk over Signal but the screen share was choppy and the audio didn't seem to come through, same thing with other video conferencing software we tried (Jitsi, Matrix). We also considered PeerTube for general live streaming but the latency isn't ideal for games where you need to react quickly.

Yeah one of the problems with streaming is that there's a lot of secret sauces that go into it, from encoding/decoding, choosing the right bitrates, and often in the case of Discord and other big names like Twitch in particular, you'll have transcoding which takes the stream and re-encodes it into more efficient and low-latency stream options (that's why you can choose what quality to watch when you watch a stream). When you go direct from A to C without taking a stop in the middle, the software basically has to trust that you are able to send that signal fast enough and without performance issues, and that the person receiving it can also handle receiving what you're sending. Then, if you're sending that to more than one person, you're having to take quite a performance hit to transmit that data that many times over, which is also what having infrastructure in the middle handles. It's also why streaming is actually stupid expensive (Twitch which is owned by Amazon, uses Amazon infrastructure like IVS to do it. You can actually see what it would cost if you did that yourself https://ivs.rocks/calculator ). All of that said, you have to find the right alternative that fits your needs, and that is pretty hard to do, particularly for free. Discord is an odd one out because it lets you do it for free. There might be some lower-cost options that might work but most lower-cost options aren't made for low-latency/high bit-rate that gaming typically needs to look "good" (Zoom for example probably won't do great).

You might give Teamspeak's streaming a shot, though it requires to use their servers I think, I haven't tried it at all, but it could be low-cost enough. I also don't know if Steam's own streaming works for that. But hopefully that gives some context on how annoying it is to find an alternative for streaming.

[Rain]

What's your usecase? Just being able to stream things to friends? Tabletop gaming?

Mostly streaming video games with friends. We usually talk over Signal but the screen share was choppy and the audio didn't seem to come through, same thing with other video conferencing software we tried (Jitsi, Matrix). We also considered PeerTube for general live streaming but the latency isn't ideal for games where you need to react quickly.

Yeah one of the problems with streaming is that there's a lot of secret sauces that go into it, from encoding/decoding, choosing the right bitrates, and often in the case of Discord and other big names like Twitch in particular, you'll have transcoding which takes the stream and re-encodes it into more efficient and low-latency stream options (that's why you can choose what quality to watch when you watch a stream). When you go direct from A to C without taking a stop in the middle, the software basically has to trust that you are able to send that signal fast enough and without performance issues, and that the person receiving it can also handle receiving what you're sending. Then, if you're sending that to more than one person, you're having to take quite a performance hit to transmit that data that many times over, which is also what having infrastructure in the middle handles. It's also why streaming is actually stupid expensive (Twitch which is owned by Amazon, uses Amazon infrastructure like IVS to do it. You can actually see what it would cost if you did that yourself https://ivs.rocks/calculator ). All of that said, you have to find the right alternative that fits your needs, and that is pretty hard to do, particularly for free. Discord is an odd one out because it lets you do it for free. There might be some lower-cost options that might work but most lower-cost options aren't made for low-latency/high bit-rate that gaming typically needs to look "good" (Zoom for example probably won't do great).

You might give Teamspeak's streaming a shot, though it requires to use their servers I think, I haven't tried it at all, but it could be low-cost enough. I also don't know if Steam's own streaming works for that. But hopefully that gives some context on how annoying it is to find an alternative for streaming.

Wow, I didn't know that at all. Thanks for the info! We've considered TeamSpeak but haven't gotten around to it yet, I'll make sure to check it out.