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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."
"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!"
Most likely TurboVNC, which has OpenGL support.
My pro tip of the day: if the machine is steaming, don't even take it out of the store.
When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
Hardly. I tried using VNC and it's ilk to stream a simple game of Hearthstone and it was terrible. Then one day, I started playing a Steam game on my laptop. I thought the graphics were above average but didn't think much of it, and then I finally realized that I was playing a game hosted on my desktop PC when I remembered that I had never downloaded that particular game to my laptop. That's how transparent Valve made it. I didn't even know it was enabled and I was using it.
I actually approached this differently. I built an over the top gaming rig which had loads of noisy fans in it, was a power pig, and was physically large. Previously that would have sat under my desk in the main family living area and made it sound like a vacuum was running all the time. I used to use that for everything from games through the surfing the web. Now I stuck it in a rack I keep in my garage and I have a low power pc sat on my desk that is passively cooled 90% of the time. Wake on lan is configured and when I want to play games - click - wait 2 mins and I'm off.
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.
But it prompts you to alert you that you're about to stream a game with a picture and all?
I just tried it out on my macbook, streaming over 1gbps ethernet from a computer sitting next to it. At 2560x1440 on Beautiful on both ends it was pretty laggy - lot of frames dropped, input wasn't super great with the mouse. With Borderlands 2 I enabled performance overlay, which reported it was running at 19.9fps with "slow encode, decode" written above at 2560x1440 Beautiful. At 1080p Beautiful and Balanced it gave me 60fps when there was little change on the screen and 30fps when I spun the camera around my character constantly. Moving the mouse around on the host computer gave fairly fluid panning on the menu screen, whilst using the mac's mouse involved a lot of jerking around (more jerkiness at lower fps, but even at 60 neither game seemed to interpolate the movements at all).
That's with mouse usage though, with a controller it might work pretty well - less precise movement. Overall pretty neat though, kinda wondering how it'd go through hamachi or similar (have aussie nbn, so 40mbit up might work if the latency isn't too bad). Tested on a Core i7 3770K with nVidia 680 SLi -> Macbook Pro 2012ish (whatever was the last iteration before the new slim model).
It could be a Valve problem.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Principle is the same as VNC, but the leap in technical sophistication is huge
There will probably be degradation of quality. From bandwidth concerns alone, there's no way they could stream uncompressed 1080p@60Hz, that would require 3 Gbit. By using something like 50Mbps they could get better quality than the ~8Mbps we se on high-quality TV streams, and could spare some CPU power by encoding less efficiently (also: decoding video requires power on the client).
In principle I'd think the clients would have problems displaying the video (this seems to be fixed if they're releasing it). Many low-end systems can't decode HD streams in real time with CPU only, and rely on hardware acceleration. There's a lot that can go wrong when displaying high quality video streams on linux: tearing, stuttering, A/V sync, etc.
It's a neat idea, but when I move, quite soon, I'll still prefer to pull a long-ish DVI (or DP if I can get a 4K monitor) and USB cable to have my gaming rig in a different room.