Steam adds over LAN streaming

[Spottswoode]

http://store.steampowered.com/streaming/
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/18299 ... deo-review
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange ... -near-you/

Computer 1 (Main)

Computer 2 (Very old laptop)
Computer 3 (Very old computer)

For those of you who don't know, (who I'm assuming is nobody so I'm talking to myself here) Steam recently added an update that allows everyone participating in the Steam Beta to stream their games from one computer to another. This, in effect, lets low end pc's and laptops play very high end games. (No snarkiness from you pc experts.) Steam will stream almost any game listed on the host computer with minimal problems, including non-steam games. (Though the latter will receive no support in the future.)

I've spent most of the day toying with it and I've got to say I'm impressed. The process took me a little while to get setup correctly, but once I did I was able to stream nearly every game in my games list with no problem over LAN cable. I had some minor problems with ESO over wifi, but zero with a lower grade laptop over cable. (I was also able to stream Doomseeker successfully, for those of you who wish to inquire.) If they can develop an automated tool to set up streaming easily, I think Steam will have significantly expanded its market. (To idiots, mind you, but expanded nonetheless.) On a similar note, if this is perfected it will destroy most of my desire to buy a mid grade Steam Machine.

So, any thoughts or questions?

[MrSetharoo]

http://store.steampowered.com/streaming/
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/18299 ... deo-review
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange ... -near-you/

For those of you who don't know, (who I'm assuming is nobody so I'm talking to myself here) Steam recently added an update that allows everyone participating in the Steam Beta to stream their games from one computer to another. This, in effect, lets low end pc's and laptops play very high end games. (No snarkiness from you pc experts.) Steam will stream almost any game listed on the host computer with minimal problems, including non-steam games. (Though the latter will receive no support in the future.)

I've spent most of the day toying with it and I've got to say I'm impressed. The process took me a little while to get setup correctly, but once I did I was able to stream nearly every game in my games list with no problem over LAN cable. I had some minor problems with ESO over wifi, but zero with a lower grade laptop over cable. (I was also able to stream Doomseeker successfully, for those of you who wish to inquire.) If they can develop an automated tool to set up streaming easily, I think Steam will have significantly expanded its market. (To idiots, mind you, but expanded nontheless.) On a similar note, if this is perfected it will destroy most of my desire to buy a mid grade Steam Machine.

So, any thoughts or questions?

So you remote input to the host and the video is streamed back to your computer?

[Spottswoode]

Yes, indeed. The input is almost seamless. I had some minor hiccups over wifi while playing online.

[MrSetharoo]

Yes, indeed. The input is almost seamless. I had some minor hiccups over wifi while playing online.

well that's bound to happen with anything on wifi. Lines are always faster that wifi.

[Spottswoode]

I think I'll get some old cat5 cabling and see if it performs any better than wifi. I really want to test how far I can push this.

[Ruin]

I like the idea. Though personally, I'm not sure if I'd use it other than to just see how it works. I'm curious how much of a burden streaming your games would put on your home network if you decide to run the wireless set up (either little to none, or nobody else in the house can do anything else while you're chewing up bandwidth streaming TF2).

[Spottswoode]

The official recommendation for wireless is an ac connection, but I've had minimal trouble with an N router. I haven't tested it while using multiple connections. I'll do a stress test later today on my network. I'll packet sniff the entire thing and make as much recorded data as I can. Can you recommend any free tools to monitor bandwidth use over the network?

[Captain Toenail]

It works really well, I've been using the beta version last two weeks.

I use ethernet cables and homeplugs and it is very smooth. I can plug my laptop into the large living-room TV and play splitscreen games with XBox controllers, all running off the desktop at the other side of the house, it's great for this kind of social-casual setup when people are round.

I could certainly see a setup in the future where there is one main 'home-server' in a house stocked up with games, movies, music, powerful GPU, and everything can be streamed to any television/laptop/tablet etc. in the home.

[jwaffe]

I'll packet sniff the entire thing and make as much recorded data as I can. Can you recommend any free tools to monitor bandwidth use over the network?

Wireshark is pretty good

http://www.wireshark.org/download.html

[mr fiat]

this sounds interesting, my laptop is rather weak on graphics (intel HD3000) so i could stream games like portal 2 or shadow warrior(2013) and have nice graphics on the laptop, with the added bonus that i can play it anywhere in the house.

[Spottswoode]

It works really well, I've been using the beta version last two weeks.

I use ethernet cables and homeplugs and it is very smooth. I can plug my laptop into the large living-room TV and play splitscreen games with XBox controllers, all running off the desktop at the other side of the house, it's great for this kind of social-casual setup when people are round.

I could certainly see a setup in the future where there is one main 'home-server' in a house stocked up with games, movies, music, powerful GPU, and everything can be streamed to any television/laptop/tablet etc. in the home.

Yeah, I'm really starting to rethink my network setup because of this. Since I can also link 5 accounts on to mine, I'm probably going to register some additional accounts so when people come over they aren't choking up my network bandwidth and my computer's ram. I'm definitely going to upgrade my main computer now.

Wireshark is pretty good

http://www.wireshark.org/download.html

I have wireshark. I wanted a slightly more sophisticated application for monitoring bandwidth over the network.


Oh, Mr. Fiat, I was able to stream all of my games to my laptop (See op for specs) with no problem. I'm actually very impressed with the quality and I see a market for steam os tablets here.

[ibm5155]

So, basically it's a onlive system where the onlive servers are actually your computer

[mr fiat]

@spottswoode

i am aware that pretty much any game woudl work, i was just listing some examples from my library.

[Ruin]

It works really well, I've been using the beta version last two weeks.

I use ethernet cables and homeplugs and it is very smooth. I can plug my laptop into the large living-room TV and play splitscreen games with XBox controllers, all running off the desktop at the other side of the house, it's great for this kind of social-casual setup when people are round.

I could certainly see a setup in the future where there is one main 'home-server' in a house stocked up with games, movies, music, powerful GPU, and everything can be streamed to any television/laptop/tablet etc. in the home.

Yeah, I'm really starting to rethink my network setup because of this. Since I can also link 5 accounts on to mine, I'm probably going to register some additional accounts so when people come over they aren't choking up my network bandwidth and my computer's ram. I'm definitely going to upgrade my main computer now.

Wireshark is pretty good

http://www.wireshark.org/download.html

I have wireshark. I wanted a slightly more sophisticated application for monitoring bandwidth over the network.

Wireshark is pretty much it. Setting up a filter just for the stream data on the live capture: statistics > protocol hierarchy, statistics > summary, or statistics > IO graph is the way to go. Though whenever I do anything bandwidth intensive, I usually get complaints that everyone's latency to services goes through the roof :P

[Spottswoode]

@spottswoode

i am aware that pretty much any game woudl work, i was just listing some examples from my library.

I was actually responding to the low graphics portion of your statement. (Meaning my laptop has ps2 graphics at best and was able to stream with no problem.)

I did manage to cause the streaming to stop whilst trying to stream apb (whilst I was additionally streaming hulu and vudu on the same network) and lost all the wireshark data I was accumulating as a result.

[Ruin]

Ok. So I gave this a try myself on a wireless N network. Setting it up was pretty easy. As soon as Steam identifies that you're logged onto two machines, you're good to go. Start the game on the host machine, go to the device you want to stream on and hit the stream button. I've been playing a lot of Rocksmith as of late, so I figured I'd try that first. Let it be known that Rocksmith does not work over in-home streaming. Defeated, I put the Rickenbacker away and tried Skyrim. I have to say that it works really well and looks quite good. I'm sure the laptop was proud of itself for pretending to run skyrim, as running it directly on the laptop would probably make it shit itself. I only saw tiny delays with the input. My initial concern was that streaming over wireless would cause issues, but the capture I snagged showed that I averaged .7 megabits per second in udp traffic while streaming, so really...I wasn't slinging that much data around while doing this (for pseudo science, I had IDE open and watched server pings; they barely changed). I'm figuring that the streaming won't be an issue. The stream itself may suffer if everyone else is hogging up the WAP's time with large downloads or other bandwidth intensive things. I think Spottswoode may have confirmed that already though. I've yet to try playing an online game, I'll give that a try some other time. Over all it is a neat idea and works well. Though personally it isn't a thing I see myself using very often.

[Klofkac]

The best use of this would probably be "playing" non-linux games on linux machine...

[Spottswoode]

The data stream is pretty bandwidth intensive. I was running vudu and trying to stream CS:GO for online play and the packet loss was pretty bad. Granted I'm using an older router on a 5mbps connection for my streaming, but the results seem to indicate that you need to have some specialized network setups for this if you want to play online streaming. It did handle singleplayer and lan play just fine even with Vudu running for 3 hours.