Overcoming Twitch Performance Issues

The Problem

A lot of people have been reporting lately that Twitch performance is not what it could be. The most common problem is that regardless of how good your Internet is, the stream will constantly buffer evey 10-20 seconds, making it nearly unwatchable. It seems to be particularly common for Australian viewers.

If you search the Googles, Bings, and what-have-yous, you'll find that this is in no way a new issue, just suddenly affecting random people over the ages, and there are a wide range of unreliable fixes out there ranging from simple to advanced. My performance just died one day about a year ago and has never worked since so I've tried most of the solutions, and they made no difference.

The Solution

There is one that works very well however. It's a program called Tardsplaya. Absolutely awful naming aside, this program allows you to store favourite Twitch streams by username and overcomes most buffer issues. Part of this is the option to create up to 4 connections, although I find that this program works fine with only a single connection, so it must have other connection improvements.

Your bandwidth usage will likely spike if you use more than one connection, so bear that in mind. Tardsplaya does tell you the bandwidth rate of each connection, to help you decide. It does reset to 4 every time you open the program though.

Note: This program only loads video. If you want to see or join chat, you will still need to load the standard webpage. Just pause the video on that page.

The Links

You can learn more at Reddit here.

Or just skip straight to the download page here.