If you enjoy watching live speed runs, tournaments, Let's Plays, or basically any type of videogame-related streaming, chances are you're spending some time on Twitch. If that's the case, you might want to mute that stream that's running in the background, because the service is getting some major changes to its transcode.
Twitch's community manager, Jared Rhea, wrote up a handy blog post listing out some of the changes we can expect from the streaming service. For one thing, Twitch is ditching the RTMP format it currently uses for something more modern, all while moving away from Flash.
The transcode labels we're familiar with (240p, 360p, 720p) are being reworded to “Low,” “Medium,” and “High,” as Twitch argues the resolution labels don't take details like bitrate or framerate into account. The new labels will roll out sometime next week.
Twitch is also merging the two transcodes it uses for web and mobile into one video network to avoid transcoding a stream twice for different formats. According to the blog post, this will free up resources for Twitch to use on other processes.
It'll be interesting to see how Twitch evolves over the coming weeks. The number of livestreaming channels seems to grow day by day, and one can only hope the number of technical difficulties drops alongside it.
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