Steam Home Streaming

[virtuo]

While I was taking pictures of a system for eBay in the living room this weekend, I thought I'd stick a Gbit LAN cable in and try out the Steam home streaming feature.

I wasn't expecting much, but it was actually very impressive. Extremely responsive to controls (I played Dirt Showdown and Tomb Raider and didn't feel disadvantaged). The graphics were very good, maybe slightly fuzzy due to the compression, but not enough to worry about at a distance on a big screen.

Sound was a bit choppy occasionally - only really noticed it in the Showdown menu music, nowhere else.

The worst thing for me was the resolution seemed locked, both systems were set to 1920x1080, but the picture I got through was in a 4:3 ratio with black bars either side (no options in game to change res, and no real indication of what the resolution actually was). Not sure if that's a limitation of the software, or my configuration wasn't right - I just plugged and played with no additional setup.


With a bit of polishing (or a more in depth configuration on my part), Home streaming could be very good, and something I'd happily consider for living room gaming.

The "client" PC doesn't even have to be massively powerful, I used the on-board graphics for my test as the GPU in the system didn't have HDMI output.

Anyone here used this feature?, not seen much discussion on it..

[Redroth]

I have dabbled with in home streaming, even over WIFI its not that bad. I actually got an old laptop playing that had trouble running any amount of firefox/chrome tabs to have a semi playable experience. I find it strange you got stuck in a 4:3 aspect ratio I didn't have any problems with this when I connected up my Sharp TV.

I personally feel its a great bit of technology, Ideally needs a Wired connection but I have had family members able to run my steam library on lower end pc's/Laptop without the need to had over so to speak the "Key's". I Never felt quite safe letting my little brother borrow my pc ever since managed to cover it in virus's age 16, he however is now 21 and I still don't trust him!

I have plans at some point in the future once I have sorted out my new build to make a low end streaming box for my main TV, so I don't have to sit at my PC to play games and I don't have a crazy amount of hardware sitting around in the living room to facilitate it.

[virtuo]

I have dabbled with in home streaming, even over WIFI its not that bad. I actually got an old laptop playing that had trouble running any amount of firefox/chrome tabs to have a semi playable experience. I find it strange you got stuck in a 4:3 aspect ratio I didn't have any problems with this when I connected up my Sharp TV.

I personally feel its a great bit of technology, Ideally needs a Wired connection but I have had family members able to run my steam library on lower end pc's/Laptop without the need to had over so to speak the "Key's". I Never felt quite safe letting my little brother borrow my pc ever since managed to cover it in virus's age 16, he however is now 21 and I still don't trust him!

I have plans at some point in the future once I have sorted out my new build to make a low end streaming box for my main TV, so I don't have to sit at my PC to play games and I don't have a crazy amount of hardware sitting around in the living room to facilitate it.

I do think the video issue was something odd in my configuration, it was a fresh windows install without the chipset drivers for one, so that's probably the first thing I would have tried. The desktop was working at 1080p, just fullscreen steam games were odd. I agree without a blazing fast LAN connection there would be some noticeable lag over WIFI.

I'm keen to try streaming from a windows host machine to a linux client. I've got 6 days left before the auction ends so I might fire up a bare debian on to the same box and see if I can get it to work. My HTPC will be even better if it does (it's running openELEC for speed at the moment, so need to get a full distro back on there).

[Jonj1611]

I have played with this a fair bit since it was released and its ok, problem is and as always seems to be with Steam there is a disadvantage and thats you cant use your main pc for anything else, the screen is literally just a mirror copy, for instance my daughter was playing a game on her computer which I had just setup the steam client on and when I went back to my machine , the main monitor had her game playing, so I thought no matter, alt-tab and suddenly daaaaaaaadddddd, oh dear, my Hexus forum page was now showing on her pc, so it really is nothing more than mirroring a desktop on a different machine.

On the plus side you dont have to install games on the other machine so guess thats a bonus. Just like with their family sharing thing, it kinda gets there but just misses the mark.