Smooth Viewing
Do channels appear choppy, laggy, or freeze altogether for you? Fixing these problems require help from both your end and the broadcaster's end.
Choppiness
Choppiness is when the video consistently plays at a low framerate. Video
frames come in very slowly, yet the audio is still playing fine. This is the
broadcaster's fault. His/her computer (most likely the CPU) is too slow to
broadcast at its current resolution. The broadcaster's computer may be too
old or he/she may be simultaneously doing some other processor intensive
activity, such as playing a game. Both situtations cause a choppy stream.
To improve the stream, you can write a comment to the broadcaster saying something like "Your stream is choppy. Please lower the resolution or stop doing other processor intensive activities while you're broadcasting." Hopefully, if the broadcaster is sitting in front of his/her computer, he/she will read the comment and improve the stream accordingly.
Lag
When video packets fail to reach your computer, lag occurs. You will see
blocky gray remnants of a past scene linger onto the current scene. Unlike
choppiness, lag is usually not consistent. It is a result of poor Internet
connection, which is unpredictable. Lag may either be caused by the
broadcaster's poor upload speed or your poor download
speed. It's hard to determine exactly which one it is.
To test if your download speed is good, visit Speedtest.net and run their test. A good download speed is 3.0 Mb/s or greater. If your download speed is lower than 3.0 Mb/s, our suggestion is that you only watch the lower bitrate channels. These channels usually have low resolution (big pixels) and blurry image quality. Watching the crips and clear channels will likely be laggy for you. If you want to view higher quality channels smoothly, then you'll need to call your Internet service provider and upgrade your plan.
If your download speed is good enough, then it's possible that the broadcaster's upload bitrate is greater than his/her Internet connection can handle. When broadcasting, he/she will see the upload gauge go to the orange or red zone. The only thing you can do to fix this is to make a comment on the channel urging the broadcaster to lower the bitrate.