It's amazing how fast they got everything back up. And at a higher quality than Twitch, too! The c3voc folks are heroes.

Quality is terrific. Probably because the lo-fi frames compress nicely! Underscores the need for a dedicated video service for live coders, algo ravers, demosceners, etc. Mux would be an interesting sponsor here ;)

Demos, especially modern/highend prods with tons of noise and other tiny details (scanline filters, fractals, ...), are legendarily ruthless encoder killers.

Kind of ironic, given how small the sources are.

That actually nicely illustrates the parallel between AI and compression. An 'almighty' AI would be able to reverse engineer the source code from what it sees and compress it back down to that size.

But then it might determine that the best compression would be no transmission at all, and decide to eradicate any potential viewers. Those damn pesky almighty AIs.

Interesting challenge

Smallest demo that compressed to the largest video file

Cat /dev/random?

That would actually be really easy to replicate in such a way that no human could tell the difference.

Somewhat lacking in the aesthetic department

Surely dd would be faster than that.

/dev/random is super slow and even /dev/urandom is surprisingly slow. If you care about performance, something like round reduced AES or ChaCha would be a decent choice.

OpenBSD /dev/(u)random uses ChaCha20 and gives me a few hundred MB/s on recent hw.

What streaming tech / infrastructure do they use?

A bunch of custom stuff around industry and open standards, from camera to mixer to transcoder to CDN to browser code.

https://c3voc.de/wiki/docu:overview