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PS4's Remote Play Update Lets You Stream To iOS Devices (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-and-improved dept.

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.

1 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. There are no technical barriers by Solandri · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    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.)