#piczeltv

Sorry tumblr, it’s been a while!

Piczel.tv has been working quietly to implement new features and upgrade our server for the past year, and we are very proud of the results. 

New Server! 4x faster, more bandwidth, better connectivity, especially for asian users

Chat update! It looks better, and should behave better

Free recordings and timelapses for all users! 

Added a dedicated “Streamshots” player - a screenshot every 10s, very low bandwidth and CPU usage. Great for mobile, slow internet, and big multistreams!

Individual message deletion in chats

Many bugfixes and performance improvements across the site

We’ll make a separate post detailing how timelapses work, and include an example.

As a reminder, Piczel.tv provides all of the following and more

Free 2x multistreaming, up to 9x with premium

Completely ad-free, high efficiency art and game streaming

Load multiple streams on one page, stop juggling multiple tabs!

Free recordings and time lapses of your streams, automatically

Up to 100 200x200 emotes with premium, usable in any chat

100% Mobile support - no more clunky, inefficient apps that can’t even show more than one multistream member

Art gallery that doesn’t compress your work like tumblr, imgur, etc

Auto loading streams and multistreams - no need to refresh to keep up

Tabbed chat, to help you keep your PMs organized rather than getting lost inline

Space efficient stream layouts, to maximize viewing space for your stream, especially on smaller monitors.

As always, thank you for using piczel.tv, we couldn’t do this without our fantastic streamers, viewers, and especially premium patreon supporters! If you would like to support our development, please consider joining our patreon, with premium starting at only $10 a month!

I just gotta say, I am seriously considering streaming exclusively from @piczeltv

My recent interactions with one of their admins has just left me in awe!

He’s been keeping up with my tumblr even though the dryspell. Was in a storm and still helped with some tech issues I had while streaming. Even reblogs stuff! 

Hello again everyone,

After another week of development on piczel.tv, we’ve got an exciting announcement!

We have released a new player type - Fast HLS - this player requires streamers to set their keyframe interval to 1, which will allow for stream latency of about 8 seconds, or 50% lower stream delay on Piczel.tv. If it proves stable, we will make this the new default, so please try it out and send us your feedback!

In comparison, our default HLS stream player, with a keyframe interval of 4, ideally has 16 seconds of stream latency. The MPEG-DASH player had approximately 60 seconds with the same settings, and the flash player could have anywhere from 4 to 8 seconds, meaning that now our HTML5 stream player can equal the flash player!

Keep in mind, the flash player uses twice as many (or more) system resources (CPU and RAM) as any of our HTML5 players, and does not work on mobile. Browsers are also making it more and more difficult to use flash, which is approaching end of life in 2020.

Recently many users have gotten emails talking about how their blogs will be hidden in the near future to anyone who is not logged in, and that does not have adult content filtering disabled. For reference, a screenshot of this email is available here.

Piczel.tv is a streaming and art gallery site and we are committed to providing an easy to use site for both our registered members and any unregistered users who are linked to a member’s gallery or stream. To that end, all streams and galleries are available to all visitors, with adult content blurred by default, which can be removed with a single click. No account is needed to see any content anywhere on Piczel.tv.

Piczel.tv also provides a content feed similar to tumblr, which includes image posts, favorites, and stream notifications. It supports tag blacklisting, adult content blurring, inline automatic live stream notifications, and you may follow a user for their posts, their favorites (which function similarly to tumblr’s reblogs), or both.

Also of note, we have recently changed our free limits on gallery uploads - free users may now upload an unlimited number of images, with a maximum file size of 2MB, while premium users have a maximum file size of 200MB. 

Our gallery and feed are still under continuous improvement, so if you have a feature you’d like to see, please let us know via a reblog, reply or email!

We would like to invite anyone who is frustrated with tumblr’s handling of their blog visibility to give us a look, we would be happy to have you on Piczel.tv!

Hello everyone!

This has been a busy month for us so far at Piczel.tv, so an update is in order.

First of all, a few days ago we attempted to migrate to a new server. Unfortunately, that new server failed under load, which caused site instability for a few hours. Thank you all for your patience while we reverted to our previous server.

After finding and deploying on a second, better new host, we have now just migrated to the new new server, and it seems both faster and smoother than either of the other servers. Notably, this should fix any stuttering/slowness that some users, especially Comcast customers, were having.

On the software front, we have upgraded our stream layout engine (Thank you to the user who helped write the logic for that!), in order to better fit various multistream layouts to your page. The layout for all multistreams should be far more efficient now - especially 2x multistreams, which are as always, free!

Further, we have spent some time optimizing our backend server:

1. We have better looking URLs for many things, especially images - basically, instead of piczel.tv:3000/image/url/goes/here they will now be something like piczel.tv/api/image/url/goes/here. Old URLs will still work, of course.

2. Server performance is vastly improved, which is especially noticeable for loading images in user galleries.

Our team has also worked hard to update our video player to the latest version, which will increase reliability and performance, you may have already noticed streams playing more smoothly and recovering more reliably from extreme buffering states.

We’ve also fixed a variety of bugs and added minor features, including the following: 1. Popout streams did not load for a while, they now do

2. The purchase premium button in the notification for non-premium users did not link to the correct page, apologies everyone!

3. Edit and Delete buttons now show on image posts if you are the owner, rather than only appearing in the gallery overview

4. Private streams no longer can be added to another stream’s page in any way. The only way to access a private stream is to go to that stream’s page (from which you can then add other streams to that page)

5. Fixed being unable to switch from Flash player to HLS player

6. The page URL will no longer update when streams on that page change. This means that when you add a stream to a page via the add stream button, or close a stream, the URL will not change, so refreshing will always put you back on the same stream you started with. This was changed because users were somewhat frequently getting confused about how the URL affected the page. You can still form custom multiviews by editing the URL if you so choose.

7. Sorting by “followed streams first” on the homepage did not work - fixed!

As always, thank you for using Piczel.tv, please let us know how we’re doing either via reblogs, emails (to piczel.tv at gmail.com), or messages in our feedback chat tab.

We’d love it if our users could reblog this post so that everyone can read about our improvements!

Hello everyone! We’ve been hard at work on a lot of bug fixing and under the hood improvements, but today we are happy to announce our latest major feature - Image galleries

Piczel.tv image galleries are the basis of a tumblr-like image host we are planning, with a followed content feed coming soon. Image content must follow the same rules as our streams, but we will not auto terminate anyone like tumblr does.

Sick of tumblr deleting your blogs, or taking down your images?

Try Piczel.tv’s new Galleries!

 Galleries are limited to 100 images for basic users, and unlimited images for premium members.

Our future plans, in no particular order, are the following:

Followed content feed (similar to tumblr, but with built in tag blacklisting - this is already implemented!)

Translations (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German)

New layout engine for multistreams, which should optimize space usage

Thanks to all our streamers, viewers, and supporters through our first year of operation, we couldn’t have done it without you. We’ve got some exciting things in store for the next year and hope you’ll all enjoy!