Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other off the hook gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other forearm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: beginning today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other forearm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: beginning today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other off the hook gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other forearm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other palm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, commence a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, commence a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I dreamed to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, commence a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I dreamed to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other off the hook gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other palm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I dreamed to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, commence a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other off the hook gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other palm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other palm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I dreamed to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders showcase off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service starts to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other forearm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I dreamed to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t demolish Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common screenplay that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: beginning today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other sensational gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: commencing today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, commence a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users blessed. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in toughly two years of public testing, thanks to its ordinary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service commences to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a plain, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without hopping through the hoops of other off the hook gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other arm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy showcase off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle earnestly.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders demonstrate off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord very likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its plain "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a elementary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other palm, determined to give it a shot.

The result: embarking today (in fact, right now), toughly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, embark a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy demonstrate off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I desired to see in that fatter window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m horrified that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only ruin movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

We attempt Discord’s fresh movie features, ask if game-chat app will ever make money, Ars Technica

Gaming & Culture / Gaming & Entertainment

Company founders display off movie talk, screen-sharing ahead of today’s test rollout.

by Sam Machkovech – Aug Ten, two thousand seventeen Four:00 pm UTC

Discord most likely didn’t need to add more major features to keep its forty five million users glad. The free text and voice-chat service has exploded in harshly two years of public testing, thanks to its elementary "talk with my gaming friends" system that resembles a more voice-heavy version of Slack.

But just as the service embarks to reach critical mass—and invites more questions about how the heck its "no ads, no required subscription" model will ever make money—the Discord team has responded with a major update: fresh video-sharing features that Discord insists will also remain totally free for all users.

“Do it in a bathtub”

When Discord co-founder and CMO Eros Resmini needs to conduct significant business, he chooses to conduct it via his own app. The free text and voice-chat service works on a bunch of hardware, and if you’re not interested in installing the Discord app on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, you can access its every feature via a ordinary, instant-load Web-browser interface. The idea: no matter what platform you are playing a game on, you can use a phone or computer to connect to friends, coordinate multiplayer sessions, and instantly sync up all-important "party" voice talk (without leaping through the hoops of other special gaming-network services).

In less than two years, it has exploded—so much so that even the company’s server providers use it almost exclusively to communicate about Discord’s needs on a daily basis. "We’ll send a DM, like, ‘we need ten more servers in US West,’ and they give them to us!" Resmini says. ("They like it, too!" Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy insists.)

Thus, it’s no surprise that Resmini, based in San Francisco, insists that we talk using Discord. However, he’s running late the day before his service’s fresh movie features will roll out, so he pings me via Discord to ask for ten minutes. After I see this message, the gaming-first nature of Discord alerts me that Resmini might be delayed for spurious reasons: he’s "in-game" with a session of Rocket League.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

Discord’s updated app will let users share a particular window with friends.

. or share their entire desktop. (Closing the correct windows is on you, bub.)

Movie talk with the webcam feed maximized.

Movie talk with space opened up for text talk.

Screen sharing with movie talk in the mix.

Another look at screen sharing.

Once Resmini calls me, however, I come to learn that he wasn’t practising for a tournament or earning loot crates. Instead, he was testing out Discord’s most promising feature yet: screen sharing.

This is a response to a common script that Discord’s fans have brought up. You might want to play a multiplayer game with a group, but when you hop into their existing voice-chat channel, you learn that some of your friends are in another online game, which could last as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. Rather than say goodbye and find another group, what if the in-game players could share their progress as a movie?

Some companies would scoff at such a request. That’s a potential quadrupling of bandwidth, and you people aren’t even paying for the default voice-chat services we already provide! Discord, on the other mitt, determined to give it a shot.

The result: kicking off today (in fact, right now), harshly five percent of Discord’s userbase will have its accounts upgraded with movie functionality. Create a private "voice" channel with other users who have also been auto-invited and you’ll be able to either turn on movie talk via webcam or share any window on your desktop. Discord will either concentrate its attention on a single executable or capture your entire desktop, then broadcast that to up to nine other users. (The target bandwidth is Two.5Mb, which will supply a 720p resolution feed at a 30fps refresh to up to five users; that movie quality will drop when the lobby number increases.)

Discord believes that this mix of window and webcam sharing will let a group of players do one of two things before an online game session: have a joy, pre-game social moment, or plot out serious upcoming-game strategies. Additionally, once you’re in-game, if you just want to share your current session with your friends, you can alt-tab out, begin a Discord movie session with your game executable targeted, and then alt-tab back in without requiring any other executables or plug-ins.

"Don’t do that in the middle of a firefight," Resmini says. Then he alludes to a common hiding place in the hugely popular online game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds: "Do it in a bathtub or something."

“I’m terrified”

Resmini and Vishnevskiy display off both the video-chat and screen-share features during our interview. The latter expose a slightly choppy but totally watchable Rocket League feed, while the former resembles other video-chat services I’ve used. Smaller live-feed boxes of each participant hover over a primary window-filling feed of one participant’s webcam. It’s up to me to click around and switch which user I wished to see in that thicker window.

Unluckily, every time I switch my window’s concentrate during the interview (which I do to type out Discord’s answers to my questions), the movie feed I see broke down entirely. I’m able to reproduce this almost a dozen times, and almost every time, one of the two representatives reflexively asks if I’m running the latest test version of the Discord client. (Movie talk will work on all platforms, even Web browsers, but screen sharing will not work in Discord’s browser-based version.)

"I’m appalled that it’s not working for you!" Vishnevskiy says. "I spent five entire hours in a row testing it myself last night."

Discord insists it’s ready for some of the potential early-testing headaches endemic with a feature upgrade like movie functionality. For one, all video-specific bandwidth will be allocated to a separate set of servers. ("If movie is too popular, it won’t ruin Discord’s voice servers," Vishnevskiy says. "It will only demolish movie calls.") Discord’s current server bank for movie bandwidth is "quadruple" the size it allots for the same number of voice-only users. The app will employ bandwidth probing for both upload and CPU use, and Discord says it is taking PC gaming spectacle gravely.

"Capturing a screen, resizing it, and compressing movie is orders of magnitude more expensive [in terms of processing]," Resmini says. "Fortunately for us, we get to work on the shoulders of giants. We’re leveraging the work of Google, to tune what they have working in Chromium, to work better for us in Discord."

The duo talks at length about quality-control systems in place at the ISP level, which Discord has had to battle in terms of packet loss for audio data. These may very well wreak extra havoc on the movie rollout. "We’d like to detect that automatically," Resmini says, "but that’s kind of a hard task."

Discord also has to retool some of its DDoS-protection systems, which sniffs incoming packets, then dumps all non-media packets "into the void." As recently as a few days ago, that system began auto-dropping half of its test movie packets. Whoops.

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