Delay modes
The difference between building a delay by holding the stream and taking one by rewinding into a buffer you already have.
There are two ways to put distance between you and your viewers, and they feel very different.
Building
The obvious approach: stop sending for a while. To open a thirty second gap you hold the output for thirty seconds, and viewers watch a frozen picture until you are done.
It is cheap, it needs no history, and it is what most tools do. The cost is that the delay takes as long to establish as the delay itself, which is useless when the round has already started.
Rewinding
freezes keeps hold of what it has already sent. Opening a gap then does not mean waiting: it means going back into that material and sending it again.
A thirty second delay applies at the next keyframe, a second or two away, whether you asked for ten seconds or ten minutes. Viewers see a short replay rather than a freeze.
Rewinding replays a moment viewers have already been shown. There is no way to avoid showing them something, and a brief replay is far less noticeable than a thirty second freeze.
The warm-up
You can only rewind into a past that exists. Thirty seconds into a stream there are thirty seconds to work with, so a five minute delay cannot be taken for free yet. freezes goes back as far as it can and holds the output for the rest, which is the old behaviour, but only for the part it could not cover.
The slider shows the reach. The stretch of track past the delay is what can be taken right now without the picture stopping, and it grows as the stream runs, out to ten minutes.
Coming back to live
Going the other way is where the cost is unavoidable. Reducing the delay moves forward through the buffer, and whatever sat between the old position and the new one is never shown.
The cut waits for a keyframe, normally a second or two, so the picture never breaks. Dropping sixty seconds in one move still means skipping sixty seconds of content, which is jarring enough that viewers will comment on it. Come down in a few steps if you would rather they did not.
Choosing
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Round is about to go live | Take the delay. Rewinding is the cheap direction. |
| Round ended, you want chat back | Come back down, in steps if the delay was long. |
| You have not gone live yet | Set the delay now. The warm-up costs nothing with no audience. |
| Stream ending in a minute | Drop the whole delay at once. Nobody will be around to mind. |
Next
- How it works for what the buffer is doing underneath
- Troubleshooting if a cut does not land the way you expected