Steam In-Home Streaming

[s_busby_uk]

I've not tested this myself but intend to now that's it's out of beta. Potentially useful if you have a powerful main PC but an older MAME PC in your cab and want to try out some Steam stuff.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/21/5738932/steam-in-home-streaming-now-available-for-everyone

[DeLuSioNal29]

Looks interesting... I'm wondering if it would be able to Stream Direct X 11 content to my Direct X 10 arcade machine.  Need to experiment!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements/detail/1371656528221232928

D

[s_busby_uk]

I think it's just a video/audio stream so don't see why not?

What I like is that this means you can buy a small capacity SSD for cheap that just houses your cabinet stuff and then have any PC games that would otherwise take up space just stream to it instead. Does mean you need another computer on in the house though...

[spoot]

Yeah, haven't look at it much........but it might just be a custom "vnc"?

[s_busby_uk]

Well it's more about immediacy, and bear in mind it also needs to deal with controller input lag effectively to be viable. A VLC stream doesn't really need to be instantaneous as it's a one-way thing.

From the site:

"We recommend a minimum of a quad-core CPU for the computer running the game. The client has more modest requirements, but should have a GPU that supports hardware accelerated H264 decoding. Any recent laptop or PC should meet the client requirements."

[DeLuSioNal29]

My rig is an overclocked liquid cooled 8 core with dual video cards, so yeah, totally excited!   

D

[RyoriNoTetsujin]

I played with this a little last night with my main rig (i5-2500K), my ASUS T100 tablet and Team Fortress 2. It was interesting. Even over my wireless network, it wasn't too bad. Not "perfect", but not offensive either.

I think the T100 just doesn't have the beef to process the video/audio streams fast enough:  Input lag was minimal, fluctuating between 1 and 3ms most of the time-- I had no problem controlling my rig from the T100's keyboard/mouse, but the video didn't update fast enough to keep up with the action on the T100 screen.  The lower the resolution was at the host, the better the client could cope with it.

That said, on more than one occasion I completely lost control of the game (random rocket shots, running into walls repeatedly) so it's still basically in beta.

That said, with a little more oomph on the client side, and some more fine-tuning, this is a pretty neat trick.

[lordnacho]

I tried this the other day and was pretty impressed.  I had it running on two pc's right next to each other and there was really no lag in the video. 

My only complaint is that the game does still "take over" the main pc(the game is up on the screen).  Was hoping it would run in the background somehow.   Granted my setup is a little weird having two pcs at one desk.