FAQ
Honest answers about what stream delay costs, what freezes sends, and how it compares to paid tools.
You cannot make time out of nothing
This is the one thing worth understanding before anything else.
Adding delay either holds the picture or replays a moment your viewers already saw. Coming back to live skips one. Every tool in this category works that way, paid or free, because the alternative would be inventing footage that does not exist.
What a good tool can do is spend that cost carefully. freezes keeps history while you stream so the switch is instant rather than a long freeze, and drains in small hops so the way back is easy to miss. That is the whole trick.
Does it cost quality?
No. There is no transcoding. Audio and video pass through byte for byte as OBS encoded them, so the picture your viewers get is identical to the one they would get without freezes in the path.
Does it add latency at zero delay?
A little. The relay adds a buffer of a few hundred milliseconds even when the delay is set to zero, because it has to assemble complete messages before republishing them. If you are chasing sub-second latency for a chat-driven format, that matters. For everything else it is invisible.
Where does my stream key go?
Onto this device and nowhere else. It is stored locally, used to open the outbound RTMP connection, and never sent anywhere but the platform it belongs to.
What gets reported about me?
Nothing. There is no telemetry, no account, no phone-home. The buffer never leaves memory on this machine and is gone when the app closes.
Is it safe to run alongside anti-cheat?
freezes never goes near the game. It is an RTMP server that OBS connects to, and the only thing it handles is the video OBS hands it. Nothing is injected, hooked, or read from game memory, and it does not know or care what you are playing.
How is this different from paid tools?
Functionally, not very. Taking a delay instantly by rewinding, rather than by freezing the picture for as long as the delay you asked for, is the feature people pay for elsewhere. freezes is MIT licensed and free, and you can read exactly what it does to your stream.
It is also deliberately smaller. There is no multi-destination routing, no browser overlay, no Stream Deck plugin and no licence server, because one delay done properly is the whole job.
The trade is maturity. Paid tools have been through more edge cases than this one has.
Why Windows only?
Because that is where the streamers are, and packaging and testing one platform properly is better than doing three badly. The RTMP core is portable and nothing in it is Windows-specific, so a port is possible if there is demand.
Can I use it without a game?
Yes. freezes is a broadcast delay and nothing else. It never looks at what you are running, so it works the same for a talk show, a watch party or a desktop capture.
Does it support multiple destinations?
Not yet. One outbound connection at a time. Multi-destination with a per-destination delay is on the roadmap.
Does it work with enhanced broadcasting?
No. Enhanced broadcasting has OBS negotiate several encoded tracks directly with Twitch over its own protocol, and freezes cannot sit in the middle of that. Turn it off and send a single RTMP output. See OBS setup.