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PS4's Remote Play Update Lets You Stream To iOS Devices (theverge.com)
Version 6.50 of the PlayStation 4's firmware now allows you to remotely play your PS4 games from an iPhone or iPad. "To access it, you'll need to download the Remote Play app for your iOS device, and then pair it with your console," reports The Verge. "Compatible games can then be played over Wi-Fi using the on-screen buttons." From the report: Announced back in 2013, Remote Play originally let you stream games from a PS4 console to the handheld PlayStation Vita, but later in 2016, Sony released Remote Play apps for both Windows and Mac. Although Sony has yet to announce a broader Android version of the service, the existence of an Android version of the app that's exclusive to Sony Xperia phones suggests there aren't any technical barriers. Bringing the functionality to iOS is a huge expansion for Remote Play, although it's a shame that you're not officially able to pair a DualShock 4 controller with the app via Bluetooth for a more authentic experience (although some users have reported being able to get the controller working via a sneaky workaround). If you're prepared to use a non-Sony controller, then you'll be happy to know that MacStories is reporting that other MFi gamepads (such as the SteelSeries Nimbus) work just fine with the iOS app. Other limitations with the functionality are that you'll need an iPhone 7 or 6th-generation iPad or later to use it, and it's also only available over Wi-Fi. You can't use Remote Play from another location over a mobile network.
PS4 version 6.50 also adds the ability for you to remap the X and O buttons on the controller.
PS4 version 6.50 also adds the ability for you to remap the X and O buttons on the controller.
PS4's Remote Play Update Lets You Stream To iOS Devices
Nobody really cares.
I love how these console companies go out of their way to make sure you can't remap the controls the way you like.
There are no technical barriers. Basically the way these remote play apps (like Steam In Home Streaming) work is that the machine playing the game converts the video into an h.264 video stream in real-time using the h.264 encoder built into every modern GPU. The device where you view the game then just receives the stream, decodes it, and displays it, just as if it were playing a YouTube video. The only difference is the device can send control inputs back to the machine playing the game. If you can program the control input part, pretty much any device capable of playing streamed h.264 videos can act as the receiving device - even a Raspberry Pi. (That's basically what the discontinued Steam Link was - a cheap Linux box that supported h.264 hardware decode and so could act as the receiver for Steam In Home Streaming.)
The only thing stopping this technology from coming to all gaming platforms and all devices capable of receiving streamed video is the (un)willingness of developers to code it. Going forward, expect the codec to eventually be updated to h.265, VP9, or AV1. (Probably not for a while though - those currently take substantially longer to encode than h.264. But it was only 30 years ago that a 1024x768 JPEG photo took several minutes to encode, and nearly a minute to decode on a then-modern PC.)
Cool. Wake me when I can buy Two PS4's and link them together like Voltron to have 1 badass gaming experience.
Didn't apple ban a similar app for PC/steam? How did Sony get by?
But even with proper controls, one of the biggest issues with streaming to a small device like a phone is that the games are designed for large displays and it reflects in the size of fonts, buttons, HUD info, even the size of things like your character in 1st / 3rd person games. What works on a large display looks terrible on a tiny one.
I saw that a lot when streaming to a PS Vita from a PS4. The streaming worked flawlessly, but then you had this miniscule screen where you could barely read anything.
Perhaps if games were compelled to have a streaming modes, or accessibility modes for sight impairments with larger layouts they could switch to that. It would make the experience a lot better.
This seems like it's hard to argue with for what you pay(nothing if you already have the relevant console); but of slightly baffling utility:
The PS4 is still limited to running one game at a time, so this isn't some multi-user terminal services thing(nor is such a thing likely given that consoles generally try to devote all the resources they can to that one game they are running; not ship with half the system idle in case someone wants to remote in); it's for use over local wifi(so 'use your home console when out and about' will be an unsupported hack at best; quite possibly too high latency to be useful) and you are stuck on a small screen with the glories of touchscreen emulation of hardware buttons.
Where's the situation where it isn't preferable to just walk over to the couch and use the TV and controller?
Apart from the ludicrous 200-fold asymmetric data throughput on home cable Internet connections, the other technical limit stopping this is the problem of indicating to the player where his or her thumbs are relative to the on-screen controls on a flat sheet of glass.
Where's the situation where it isn't preferable to just walk over to the couch and use the TV and controller?
It's for people who don't live alone. If a PlayStation 4 console can use your phone as a monitor, two people in the household can experience Sony at once. While you play a PlayStation 4 game, someone else can use the TV to play a game on a PlayStation 3 console that's still hooked up, watch a Columbia movie on cable, IPTV, or Blu-ray Disc, or even just watch Jeopardy!.
....downloading porn at Starbucks.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
nVidia GameStream, Steam Link... as usual, the PC precedes the consoles in gaming features. Remember when it was the other way around? I was still young then, and life was so full of promise... :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The PlayStation library really tanked after 2.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Sony knows what it's doing and did not want to kill its XPeria or Vita sales prior to this.
Now that iOS is out (ironically this means that nobody would buy XPeria), they may as well want to start porting this application to other Android phones, before the sideloaded versions come out.