Steam’s In-Home Streaming feature is now out of beta, allowing any users on Valve’s PC distribution service to stream games between two computers on the same network. This means you can plop a high-end gaming PC in one room and let it handle all the heavy-duty work while you stream games to your laptop.
Or, theoretically, you could get a cheap Steam Machine to run games on your TV while your bulky gaming PC sits in the office, doing its thing.
Valve has a hub page for In-Home streaming right here.
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12 responses to “Steam In-Home Streaming Now Live For Everyone”
Wicked. Been waiting for this since they announced it. Will it work with non-steam games that have been added manually to Steam though…?
EDIT: According to the “known issues” non-Steam games added to the Steam library may work, but aren’t officially supported.
Yeah it’s a bit hit-and-miss, I managed to get it to actually stream my whole desktop at one point and at others it would just not launch at all. And in case you were wondering, it has very, very minimal lag over a wired network (Gigabit or even 100/10 Megabit work fine) sitting in around 10ms – 80ms and on an AC WiFi network with direct line-of-sight I can get around 30ms – 80ms of lag.
Perfect for anything that isn’t professional Counter Strike.
There you go Pirate Pete
Woo!
Taken from the hub page:
What other devices do you think they are talking about? iOS? Android? WinPho? Smart TVs? Chromecast?
AppleTV, Roku, Ouya, that Amazon Fire thing?
Does it have to be an x86 target? How would a RasPi go? The CPU isn’t crash hot but it does have hardware accelerated h.264 playback and apparently handles 1080p playback fine. But it will have to be WiFi.
EDIT: At this point yes, the Steam client itself is only x86 at this point so no Pi. If only I had an Nvidia card though: http://misapuntesde.com/post.php?id=347
After reading on their Hub Page they say support for streaming to more devices is coming soon, and I honestly can’t think of any consumer x86 devices that don’t run standard Linux, OS X or Windows. That suggests to me that ARM is the next platform they will target. Which makes sense because you’ve got iOS, Android, Apple TV, most smart TVs, Windows Phone and a plethora of other devices all using ARM.
Give it some time, I think it’s on the way, whether from Valve officially or from an awesome neck-beard.
Very exciting, wonder about the overhead on the streamer though. Like the possibility in having to maintain two sets of game quality settings for playing locally and remotely..
i was completely unaware of this being in development.
this is awesome i should be able to play from my main pc onto my surface pro on my lap, this will be great. gonna give it a shot when i get home
I had a crack with this this tonight, streaming to the telly via a 6-year-old Asus M50V and 802.11n. I was totally amazed by how smooth the experience was. I couldn’t detect any input lag and there were no obvious compression artifacts in the video. Some of the games I tested had a few pops in the audio however. It’s awesome when something like this just basically works as advertised.
Was a bit disappointed the game still needs to be full screen on the source. 🙁