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Valve In-Home Game Streaming Supports Windows, OS X & Linux
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Valve has today pushed out a new update to its Steam client on all three of the major OSes that finally takes In-home Game-Streaming out of beta. Similar to NVIDIA's GameStream, which streams native gameplay from a GeForce-equipped PC to the NVIDIA SHIELD, Valve's solution lets you stream from one PC to another, regardless of which OS it's running. What this means is you could have a SteamOS-based PC in your living-room, which is of course Linux-based, and stream games from your Windows PC in another room which ordinarily would never run under Linux. Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."
Is there any degradation in video quality?
"Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."
Unfortunately, the vice versa part isn't quite there yet, only Windows PCs can be the host OS at the moment. Valve do intend to patch in host functionality on Linux and OS X eventually though.
No AmigaOS support!?
They're shooting themselves in the foot!
With this I can grab a little steambox for my TV in the living room and play all my steam games on that from the comfort of the sofa. No worries about having to only buy Linux compatible games as I already have a Windows PC purely for games anyway. I'll see how well this works tonight when I can stream a PC game to my Mac laptop but if it works well then I'm sold.
This is what Sony should have done with the PS4 - let users stream from their old PS3 to the PS4 rather than rely on the PSNow solution they're pushing but I guess they don't have the flexibility of a PC to do that sadly.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Now I am going to buy a steaming Linux machine just so I can play games from the Windows machine I already bought for gaming, this is going to be so awesome!
Valve is the best thing to happen to gaming since slided bread.
I struggle to see myself playing on the couch with a keyboard and mouse which I use for most PC games. The exception might be car racing games or arcade fighting games where a controller might come in handy. Make that a couple of controllers so a mate can join in. Game makers would need to add support back in for split screen.
You can only stream from Windows, so it doesn't fully 'support' Linux or OS X.
and fires every mother fucking one of them with the absolute minimum severance required by law
and the executives die of cancer
This is a pretty nice feature they added. It's much better than VNC or any other remote desktop software I've tried. About my only complaint was the mouse was a bit laggy running Skyrim.
But seeing Skyrim stream pretty much flawlessly to computer than can BARELY play 1080p videos without some chop was pretty amazing.
+1 Steam ^.^
I tested from win 7 to win 7. I have my semi-big gaming/office rig, and streamed to a late model P4 with no GPU of note (chipset intel), that I used as a storage box/htpc in my bedroom. I could stream skyrim pretty much full blast well, however I did notice a reduction in quality. It varied, but there was sometimes lag (quite possibly poor wifi and the woeful nature of an old p4 struggling with windows 7) and obvious compression artifacts, but for the most part it was well playable. One side note is that when it launched on my other PC, I could hear the audio from it, so at least at that point in the beta it wasn't muting the source machine audio. If you left big speakers on 11 that could be an issues, but hopefully it is fixed now. I did not test it long as I rebuilt my main rig, and the old one became my bedroom htpc, and had plenty of horsepower to play without streaming. All in all I think a good feature with many use cases.
Silence is a state of mime.
I see multiple comments saying that people have a Steam Box next to the TV. It might nice if they gave people buying these the option to spend a little extra and get them with pre-configured PVR functionality so that the owners could also use them to time-shift their TV shows.
Works great for me with no noticeable latency or reduction in image quality on a gigabit network. Be sure to adjust the quality setting in the options.
This is unfortunately a fairly pointless feature for me. I have my gaming PC hooked up to the TV. When streaming, you can't use the host computer for anything but the game. In fact, the game is running in the active frame buffer on the host computer and everything you do will be displayed on both screens. You can even provide input to the game on the host computer and the client computer at the same time. This would only be useful for me if someone can use the gaming PC for Netflix while I stream a game to my laptop. Netflix consumes hardly any resources on this computer, so it should be completely possible to do this with an off-screen frame buffer. I suppose there would have to be driver support for this, though.
It should be pretty obvious this is what Valve is aiming with all this stuff. I'm sure some of the twitchiest games are unsuitable for streaming but the vast bulk would play just fine. If SteamOS survives at all as a platform it'll probably be as a stick like device which streams games from somewhere else.
The streaming part works perfectly fine, even over slower Wifi. Gamepads aren't recognized on the remote side, though - tried Sonic Generations and my gamepad didn't show up in the config.
Sooo, Valve... could we have controller support for streaming, too? Pretty please? :-)
If you have a case with two drive bays in it, install Windows on one and Linux on the other. That way you don't have to deal with all the bullshit that results from Windows and Linux dual-booting these days (bullshit, by the way, which is entirely the result of Microsoft enforcing a policy of incompatibility).
Buying another piece of hardware that streams Windows games from a Windows PC you might not even OWN, to a Linux based PC seems like overkill when you can just...run them on the same PC. Granted, Microsoft is doing everything to try and prevent that, but you can still do it, and I'm guessing it'd be several hundred dollars cheaper than Valve's bizarre foray into the console world.
i would be really nice if there was an ARM build of the program that way you can use raspberry pi as a viewer.
The Raspberry pi supports H.264 decoding so hardware wise it should be able to do it. Now its just waiting for the software
Can I play competitive FPSs well on this?
Even if not this is still great, I can now play civ5 on my old laptop on my bed. Any information if this works well over wifi or do we need ethernet?
I was streaming last night from a Win 7 host (Haswell i5 + Radeon 7950) to two different laptops.
The first was a Lenovo S10-2 netbook (Atom 1.6ghz single core w/ 1gb of ram) running windows XP which had no issue setting up the stream and pulling the game from the host machine, but was lagging like crazy. I did not connect this machine to ethernet and was relying on the integrated wireless B connection. I would guess that the machine was powerful enough to display the streaming content but the connection was causing the significant input delay and quality issues I was seeing.
The second laptop was a Samsung model (don't remember the exact model but it's 2012 era) with an i5 and a discrete card connected to my TV through HDMI and in "Big Picture" mode. Loading a streaming game was very simple and took a few seconds for the host machine to boot into the game and display on my TV. I loaded Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD, Bioshock Infinite, Volgar the Viking, and Transistor. All 4 games displayed at full resolution and graphical detail as they would on my host machine and I could not detect any sort of input delay. I tried this set up with both an Ethernet connection as well as through the laptop's wireless N connection and still did not notice any change in the experience. The one issue I did run into was that streaming did not prevent the laptop from turning off the screen as if it were inactive and when I moved the laptop's mouse the stream would stay black (though sound could be heard).
All told it was an awesome experience if you have a modern gaming computer and old hardware lying around.
I tried it yesterday, Streamed South Park SoT from my Win8 Desktop in the basement to my Macbook Pro on Wifi. seemed that timing was a little off, with blocks in combat and stuff, but I am still toying with it