When I say latency I am referring to the time it takes for what the broadcaster says and does to what the viewers see. You can experience latency as high as 30 seconds on platforms such as YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, and many more. This high latency is not ideal if the broadcaster is trying to interact with their audience. Imagine asking the broadcaster a question and they respond to it 15 to 30 seconds later. What a mess!

I am proud to say that after over two years of frustration and a lot of sleepless nights, our sites now have a full HTML5 live video solution that can provide 2 second latency even at 1080p60 resolution. This is a huge step forward for VaughnSoft and a big step forward in the fight for low latency live streaming. However 2 seconds is still a long time. My goal is to reach sub second latency with full HD live streaming and I will not stop until that happens.

Thank you all that have been patient and supportive during the frustration of getting this new video system dialed in. There is more work to be done!

This is only the beginning.

Mark Vaughn

It’s been 48 hours since we officially rolled out the new low latency HTML5 video system on Vaughn Live. So far everything is looking very stable on the server side and mostly stable on the player side. Here are some known issues with the new HTML5 video player:

• Stream loads, plays, pauses, then resumes playing smoothly.
• Sometimes a black screen but with audio. Pause/Play or Refresh typically fixes that. **
• Fullscreen crops the video if you have your browser zoomed in (CTRL + 0 to reset browser zoom)
• Volume defaults to 100% when unmuting despite the pre mute volume being much lower.
• Volume will show as muted but not unmute when muted speaker is clicked if you unmuted the player in another tab.
• If a stream takes several seconds to load, this is due to you landing on a video edge server that hasn’t propagated the stream yet. This happens the most for streams with few live viewers or streams that have just gone live.
• If you see a message on the video player that says “Cannot watch this stream on this player Click here to watch on the Flash player”, this is not a browser issue. This is due to the broadcaster using the Go LIVE Now broadcast tool (aka MvnCaster) or incorrect encoder settings. These streams will have to be watched on the Flash player until the broadcaster corrects their issue.

So when will the rest of our sites get this new video player? More work needs to be done on the video player side before that happens. But we are very close!

** UPDATE: Fixed one of the causes of the black screen moments ago.

After 6+ years we have decided that it is time to retire guest chat on Vaughn Live. At this point in time it no longer fits with the vision we have for the site. Guest chat was once a fun way of quickly interacting with others but in recent time has become a tool for malicious trolling. While this feature was off by default, some broadcasters would turn it on and not moderate their chat at all. And many new broadcasters would be pushed by viewers to enable guest chat simply so folks could hatefully troll them.

Rather than add more hoops for the malicious guests to jump through when banned (as it is we IP ban them left and right), we felt it’s best to move forward without guest chat. You will still be able to view chat without being signed in and you can easily create a free account to chat. This change will allow us to better focus our time on those that enjoy the site rather than those that wish to harm it and its community.

RIP guest chat 2011-2018

Guest chat will be disabled across all VaughnSoft sites in the next 24 hours.