Xbox One Twitch broadcasting: See what video looks like on the lowest and highest settings

In four days, Xbox One owners will have the capability to broadcast their gameplay to the world.

Microsoft will add livestreaming to the Twitch app on its latest home console early next week. This will enable players to share live video to the Internet with the push of a button. I got my hands on an early build of the software, and I can say that it works and looks pretty good. Let’s take a look at how everything works and what the video looks like in action.

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Getting started

To stream games from the Xbox One, you need a Twitch account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up for one online. If you already have an established channel, you’ll have to boot up the app and then select the “broadcast” or log-in option. You cannot just enter your username and password. Instead, you’ll have to enter an alphanumeric code the Xbox One gives you on Twitch.tv/activate.

The process just takes a moment, and hooking into your account will also automatically enable you to see which of your Twitch friends are streaming online.

Settings

Before you start your first broadcast, you’ll probably want to mess about in the Twitch options. You can customize your stream a bit, but some things are frustratingly missing. Here’s what’s at your disposal.

• Kinect camera: You can turn it off and on. You can also adjust which corner your face will appear in.
• Microphone: Turn your mic on or off as well as adjust its volume.
• Broadcast title: Use the onscreen or a USB keyboard to change the name of the livestream.
• Quality: Livestream at very high, high, medium, or low bitrates.

So, what’s missing? Well, you can’t adjust the volume level of the game from this menu. To do this, you’ll likely have to go into the settings of each title and turn down its individual volume level. That’s a pain in the ass. If you don’t do this, the audio is going to drown out your voice.

How good is ‘very high’ quality — and how bad is ‘low’?

The Twitch app will recommend a bitrate for you. I have AT&T’s fiberoptic cable that’s supposed to get around 20 Mbps download, but I’m lucky if it gets 12 Mbps. This didn’t matter because the Xbox One suggested I stream at the highest quality, which is 2,500 Kbps. Here’s what that looks like:

On the other end of the spectrum, we have 800 Kbps. That doesn’t look quite as good, but I guess it’s better than nothing:

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During a stream

Once you’re up and running, you have a few other options.

The Twitch app is always running in the background, but if you snap it to the side of the screen, you can preview what the Kinect camera is seeing. You can also see what the people are typing into your channel’s chatroom. This works well, but it definitely felt like it was impacting the performance of my Call of Duty: Ghosts match. The framerate was bouncing up and down creating jittery moments.

Things smoothed out for Ghosts when I unsnapped Twitch (but let it continue broadcasting). Unfortunately, in this mode, I couldn’t see the chat. I would have to bring it up separately on the laptop or a tablet.

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Thankfully, the performance issues might only be with Call of Duty: Ghosts. That game has had framerate issues independent of Twitch for the last few weeks on Xbox One. I tried Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and that game ran well regardless of what I was doing with Twitch.

While you’re broadcasting, you can adjust all of the aforementioned options in the settings menu except the quality of the stream.

What Xbox One Twitch won’t stream

Twitch on Xbox One only works with games. If you hit the home menu, it will go to an animated idle screen. The stream will automatically continue when you return to in-game action. Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t want anyone using this software to broadcast movies from Netflix.

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Of course, this also presents some problems. When I switched from Call of Duty: Ghosts to Assassin’s Creed IV — both games that I own on disc — the stream came to a hard stop. I had to restart the broadcast after I got Black Flag running.