How It All Goes Live: An Overview of Discord’s Streaming Technology

Go Live is one of Discord’s most popular features, allowing users to stream applications, screens, and especially video games, to others on the call. Originally released for the desktop on August 15, 2019, it’s grown to support web browsers and phones, and even gained support on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles this last year.Go Live’s screen sharing technology is a multi-process pipeline that requires coordination between streamers, viewers, and Discord’s backend. Each part of the process needs to support the large image resolutions and high framerates that are crucial for everything from showing off your favorite fast-paced games to crisp text legibility during document sharing. Any part of the flow can become a bottleneck and degrade the experience, so every component must work efficiently.CaptureGo Live continually captures updates to your application and screen using the optimal method available on your operating system. It has a robust fallback system so if one method fails,...