Has anyone had any success with Steam Home Streaming?

[bouncer_the_dog]

It looks awesome. I have a beast of a gaming rig collecting dust in my office as I have no where to put my gaming set up at home. But with this steam home streaming I could, in theory, put 'The Monolith' as I call it in the cupboard under the stairs and then play Company of Heroes 2 on my totally not gaming work only mac laptop. BUT has anyone here actually managed this?

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

More : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3629-RIAV-1617

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

Guess that's a no then.

 

[stuff_it]

If you had a networked telly in the kitchen do you think there would be a market for a touch sensitive chopping board with a game controller printed on it?

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

Maybe wii style controls with a measuring jug and a cheese grater.

 

[fucthest8]

No. I tried, but it fails every time on my laptop streaming from my son's gaming PC just upstairs. No idea why. Crashes the game thats running on his PC.

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

I have cleared out the cupboard under the stairs. It's entire contents is in the back of my car.

I will be getting a shelving unit from Jewson and and putting my gaming PC in there.

The objective is to have Company of Heroes 2 whirring away in the cupboard, happily transmitted to my Mac (which otherwise would be totally incapable of running it). Slightly worried about the PC over heating and have no idea if it will work.

The problems will be remote desktopping to the PC from the mac to fiddle with it and making sure that the Virgin router can hack it.. thinking about taking a punt on a Airport Extreme or even a Timecapsule to ensure half decent streaming... But that's crazy as the only outlay at them moment is a shelf. It will also house the iron, a tool kit and the hoover.

The intention is to be able to surreptitiously play the gaming connoisseurs choice of Steam games on a laptop that can't cope with them normally. My house no longer has a man zone, or a batcave. And a shed is a distant dream.. This is about seizing the kitchen table for a bit of Dishonoured before hiding the laptop in a drawer before a two year old decides to 'help'...

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

For anyone who is even vaguely interested I set this up and here is a picture:

That was my first test of my PC rig in the cupboard under the stairs streaming, via wi-fi, Company of Heroes 2 to a rMBP with an integrated graphics chip.

Nerds should be impressed as COH2 is a notorious system hog and I was playing it on a mac (booted into OSX) and the fan wasn't even on!!

However COH2 is not optimised for streaming and is too dark on the Mac. So I have been sitting in the cupboard playing it. Which my wife found sad and hilarious when she found me..

Here are some to tips for those interested:

• The streaming is fixed to the aspect ratio of the host machine - it cannot get any larger. Which can be flipping confusing whilst trying to configure a retina screen. Also varying the resolution ingame can cause steam to crash.
• What that means is you cannot go higher resolution than the host
• 720p seems to be fine on wi-fi - higher gets encode/decode & stutter I tested Dishnoured (on ultra), Deus Ex and Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim all on highest settings but 720p. Works fine plugged into a TV with an Xbox (wired controller as wireless ones may not work)
• You can tell the client machine to stream it only in 720p when the host can be chugging out 4k or whatever
• Wired via ethernet is good for higher resolutions.
• basically it's brilliant

The next is to build a cheap as chips steam box to plug into the TV. I have read this is possible with a raspberry pi!!

Anyway this appears to be a great wayto re-invigorate old or underpowered laptops as round the house gaming machines..

that is all.

 

[golightly]

Excellent! I thought that stealing one of the kid's books to use as a mousemat was a nice touch.

 

[maomao]

This looks great and will be trying to get it working very soon. One thing that's not clear from the Steam documentation is whether you can continue to use the computer that is actually running the game to do other tasks or whether the two screens will essentially show the same things. My games machine is in the family room and would be great if I could play upstairs while mrs maomao browses or watches tv on it downstairs.

 

[bouncer_the_dog]

I don't think you can. It's basically just mirroring, that seems to work well with games & controllers for games. I have managed to crash the game and be dumped onto the PC desktop (on my mac in another room) and open photoshop & chrome and check my gmail before Steam realised what was happening and kicked me off.

I have been mostly playing Batman Arkham City - works great at 720p