🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2015-10-22, Werner Punz <we...@gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi guys as an owner of an NVidia shield and soon also of a Steam Link 
> box, I want to open this tread to discuss all things gamestreaming.
> This might become a huge topic for the years to come, since it moves
> pc gaming into the living room.
>
> First of all I have been using Steam Inhome streaming in the past over 
> wifi and full lan connections with an xbox controller hooked up to my 
> notebook (which itself was hooked to my tv). Wifi it worked more or less 
> but you could forget about action games due to occasional wifi hickups. 
> RPGs and slower paced games worked fine.
>
> The problem still was the input method which basically came down to 
> either buy a wireless mouse and keyboard and use that from the couch or 
> play with a controller. In the end I settled for a controller which 
> however locked me out of certain genres.
> (I am not a fps fan, so I could care less about mouselook and 0ms input lag)
>
> Now I have moved over to a NVidia Shield. Plus side 4k gaming and 5.1 
> sound in the living room finally works with the latest beta drivers. The 
> input lag also is neglectable on a wired connection, however the game 
> selection is limited due to the enforced controller only games 
> selection. Out of my 120-130 steam games NVidia has recognized about 19 
> being playable on the shield without limitations, mostly aaa titles.
> However in the Shields case a wired connection really was/is a must. 
> What really suprisingly worked well was their Gamestream service (which 
> I tried during the beta phase) even with 20-40ms lag the games were 
> really playable. And NVidia definitely had servers all over europe given 
> the low ping times I got here in central Europe (20-30ms to NVidias servers)
> But either way I dont like to pay a monthly fee for their service for 
> 80% of games I own anyway and 20% which are mildly interesting. You 
> cannot even save your games to the steam cloud if you play that way.
>
>
> So the next step will be the Steam Link and Steam controller on November 
> the 10th. I have high hopes on this one, because in my general opinion 
> Steam Inhome Streaming works a tad better than NVidias solution and does 
> not rely entirely on the graphics hardware for the encoding. However the 
> downside is, no 4k gaming 2.0 sound. The plus side will be that the 
> Steam controller will open other genres to couch gaming. Given the 
> reports of various people it is a good controller, however certain 
> genres lend better to the controller than others. FPS (for fans of that 
> stuff) for instance are somewhere between a controller and a mouse 
> keyboard combo, if you configure it correctly. The key here will be the 
> configuration since the controller is not really a standard controller 
> (it can emulate an xinput controller) but you can remap the hell out of it.
>
> So I will look forward to November the 10th when I get my Steam link gear.
>

I tried Steam In-home streaming earlier in the year.
Server was a moderately powerful Win7 PC, client was Fedora linux,
infrastructure was GigE ethernet.

I found that the overhead of encoding the video cost about 10fps on my
host PC, and there was a big detriment to video quality. I gave up on
the idea and ran HDMI through a CAT-5 adapter instead.

That's not been ideal either; At 1080p there are occasional dropouts
so I have to run at 720p. Depending on if I want to play on my main PC
or send it to my living room means I have to reconfigure my PC's video
output and default soundcard. Can't find any way to automate this at
the moment and it's a real PITA.

- 
Toby
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject to circumvent my email filters.