New geo-routing, tier changes, wiki and more! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, I know it takes us a while to release updates for VRCDN but I promise you the wait is worth it! I’ll start by announcing some probably lesser liked news, and we’ll finish on something that I know our team has been focusing on for a while... that I already teased on Twitter (https://twitter.com/senpaijazzy #ShamelessSelfPromotion) 

We understand that a lot of you want to use VRCDN to stream movies and TV shows to your friends in VR, and I know a few of you have brought this to our attention, but I am sorry to say that we cannot allow this. It is against the law to re-distribute copyrighted content through VRCDN (and to re-distribute it in general) and we will continue to take action against any user that attempt to stream or upload such content. As this could also pose a risk of our network landing in legal trouble, so as you can imagine this is a top priority for us to crack down on. 

From the start of VRCDN we’ve always wanted to have different resource allocations per Patreon tier. This would allow us to provide tiers with more concurrent viewers, some with higher resolution video, more relay keys, etc., all in an effort to make sure you can have more choice of how much or how little of VRCDN you’d like to use. This has proven to be a huge task as not only does it require the logic for handling the Patreon tier information but it also requires our network to perform more checks, which puts an additional load upon it. If not planned and developed correctly this additional strain would result in our network being overwhelmed, something we don’t want. We now feel we are in a position where we can start rolling it out, so without further ado here is what will be changing:

Those on the lowest tier Patreon (Helping Out) will have access to: 

• Live streams (public only) 

• Guest streams 

• 1 VOD upload 

This change will happen from the first of September, no other tiers will be changing at this time. For users on the lowest tier with more than 1 VOD uploaded: the extra VODs will not be removed at this time. 

The VRCDN team is aware that a large portion of users is on the lowest tier due to their financial situation, the world is an expensive place right now. We apologize if this affects you, but please understand we are doing this to help cover the rising costs of the network and to create more choice for you. For example, extra relay keys are something we get asked for a lot, so having an automated way to get them would be a huge help to many! 

VRCDN logins are changing! We are finally ready to deploy what we call VRCDN Identity! Our new ID service will act as a single point of authentication across all of our apps and services, meaning you will use one account to access everything. It also comes with tons of security features such as two-factor authentication, visibility over apps that have used your VRCDN account, and more! You can still link and then login with your Patreon account if you prefer. This also means if Patreon goes down you will still be able to log into VRCDN without issue. Please keep in mind that this service is still in development and is not perfect, we’re glad for any bug reports and suggestions you might have. 

For those who use VRCDN.Live, you will first need to login with Patreon. This will create a VRCDN ID account and automatically link it to your Patreon, or if you already made account beforehand you will need to link it with Patreon. After this step you are free to login with VRCDN or your Patreon account if you prefer!

Documentation is something we have not been on top of since day one. This is mainly due to us not having a lot of spare time to sit down and properly write out manuals and documentation. However, thanks to our amazing Community Support team **we now have a Wiki!** This Wiki will be the single source containing all documentation for VRCDN stream and our VRChat bots or anything we might come up with in the future. New posts will be added to it as well as translations so be sure to check it regularly to stay up to date! You can find it at https://wiki.vrcdn.live 

Okay... on to the BIG news, **global routing changes!** The way VRCDN currently routes users to our nearest server is by figuring out what country they are in and pointing them to one of our servers in that country or other geographically nearest location. This doesn’t work well for countries such as America as since our servers are on the East and West coast, users sometimes connect to our server on the opposite side of the country. As of today, our new routing system will now split the country of America in half and will properly connect you to the nearest server! Although you still have a way to specify server manually by using the prefixes... we plan on rolling this out to other regions soon but for now will only test this in America. To ease anyone worried that we may be storing the results of the “figuring out what country” part of our geo-routing, please do not worry. This data is not stored as we have no reason to store it. 

As usual, please report any and all bugs to us in our #support channel or via email: contact@vrcdn.live 

Happy streaming!