You are reading the documentation for the in-development version of Streamlink.

Common issues

Streams are buffering/lagging

Enable caching in your player

By default most players do not cache the data they receive from Streamlink. Caching can reduce the amount of buffering you run into because the player will have some breathing room between receiving the data and playing it.

Player	Parameter	Note
MPC-HC	--	Currently no way of configuring the cache
MPlayer	-cache <kbytes>	Between 1024 and 8192 is recommended
mpv	--cache=yes --demuxer-max-bytes=<kbytes>	Between 1024 and 8192 is recommended
VLC	--file-caching <ms> --network-caching <ms>	Between 1000 and 10000 is recommended

Use the --player-args or --player option to pass these options to your player.

Multi-threaded streaming

On segmented streaming protocols (such as HLS and HDS) it's possible to use multiple threads for downloading multiple segments at the same time to potentially increase the throughput. This can be done via Streamlink's --stream-segment-threads argument.

Note

Using 2 or 3 threads should be enough to see an impact on live streams, any more will likely not show much effect.