Nvidia ends Gamestream on all Shield devices. Suggests switching to Steam Link | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia ends Gamestream on all Shield devices. Suggests switching to Steam Link

nvidia.custhelp.com

36 pointsfffrantz23 comments

I believe the issue might be the game publishers.

I have a working alternative to Gamestream - both Server and Client, written in C++ - lying around here. It's just that I could never figure out how to monetize it, so now I'm just using it for me and my friends.

But when testing it, I noticed that quite a lot of competitive games will consider it "cheating" if you try to grab the screen in real-time. I presume that's to avoid AI-based aimbots who would actually just recognize the enemy based on the picture.

Also, some games outright forbid using game streaming services in their EULA, which is how pretty much everything by Blizzard & Activision got booted off Geforce NOW.

And if you think about it, it does make financial sense for them to forbid streaming. As-is, I am sharing one purchased copy of the game with my friends. We have one cheap GPU server with Hetzner and we take turns playing the games. Or we play a couch-coop game online with multiple Gamepads connected to that one server. If you prevent this form of sharing, each of us would have needed to purchase a copy of the game to install locally, so the publisher is potentially losing money by tolerating game streaming.

> And if you think about it, it does make financial sense for them to forbid streaming. As-is, I am sharing one purchased copy of the game with my friends. We have one cheap GPU server with Hetzner and we take turns playing the games. Or we play a couch-coop game online with multiple Gamepads connected to that one server. If you prevent this form of sharing, each of us would have needed to purchase a copy of the game to install locally, so the publisher is potentially losing money by tolerating game streaming.

You can essentially do all of this with Steam anyway. You can use the Steam Family Sharing to share your video games like that if you're playing at different times. And you can use Let's Play Together to all remote to the same computer and play split screen.

Yes, but Steam runs on your local machine with a unique IP while Gamestream / Geforce Now run on shared IP cloud machines.

How do you know that the same game starting twice on the same cloud IP is the same user, and not the provider of that cloud service underpaying you?

Oof. Steam link is great and all, but I've been wondering how green the grass is on the green side. I guess it's now brown.

I'm not sure if Steam Link (software) supports 120 Hz or HDR, but I haven't found any hardware decoder that does. Steam Link (hardware) is also defunct.

Steam link supports 120hz and HDR. Regarding hardware, you can build your own steam link on rpi 3b/4, but for HDR i assume that you will need a rpi4.

rpi 4 HDMI can't do 4K120. I'm looking for a relatively new piece of hardware. Recent Apple TVs have the PHY for it but it isn't enabled in software.

Also, Apple's decode engine struggles with 4K60. The right answer is likely a full-on mini-PC, but it feels like a sledgehammer for a fly.

Can you confirm you've used HDR with Steam Link software and it worked correctly?

I saw a reddit post saying the HDR gets washed out by the Steam Link software and it should be disabled.

Moonlight genuinely works for me with HDR so I've never had reason to test the Steam Link software for myself.

I am a little surprised, I assumed Gamestream was mostly local. I imagined it was similar to Plex/Jellyfin where the computer is doing all of the transcoding.

I know that the Nvidia Shield TV Pro is a flagship product and highly recommended in home media server circles. It's not hard to imagine Nvidia shifting their focus to that product and sunsetting a feature that doesn't overlap a lot with that crowd.

Nvidia Shield TV Pro is one of the only devices I know of that can play back Dolby Vision files properly, at least via Plex/Kodi. The specific DV profiles supported is a work in progress but the most common webrips are detected properly and enable Dolby Vision mode on the TV. BD Rips aren't completely supported by any device other than disk players, but non DV fallback usually works fine. Chinese TV boxes have unofficial DV support but certain surround codec support can be spotty and support could mean simply discarding the metadata. Kodi added support recently on android builds but DV needs hardware level support as well for true playback.

Oof, I liked Gamestream compared to the alternatives. Would be nice to see some clarification if this is just for Shield, or if they plan to kill Gamestream use all together...

There's an open source implementation of the Gamestream called Sunshine that does pretty well, but it's got a few kinks still (no HDR support).

:( My wife and I use Gamestream to play heavier games in our living room. Steam Link is great but some games don't play nice with Steam Link and others don't like Gamestream. I also have noticed that Gamestream runs much better on my shield then link. I hope the protocol sticks around, I don't see why they would if that's how their GFN service works.

Is this signaling that they’re going to remove gamestream functionality from GeForce experience?

I would think that would open them up to class action.

Moonlight still exists for the time being.

Moonlight uses the driver side of this. If they are depreciating their in house client side then I imagine the driver side is about to be killed as well, meaning Moonlight may be about to be unusable.

Wow that would be awful, Moonlight is incredible.

I rely on Moonlight and would have to drill a fiber optic HDMI cord through the wall to my basement if Nvidia shut down the software it utilizes.

I'm absolutely devastated NVIDIA are like this, we can't let them do this. It's such a useful feature with the best latency, stability, and overall performance. With AV1 HW encoding this could've become even better with 4K HDR 120 FPS with minimal bandwidth requirements.

Moonlight is open source, and there is an open source server (Starburst?) if you're really interested. The open source server is multiplatform as well.

There is always this alternative implementation: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

EDIT: Oops, misread, the OSS client is called moonlight: https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-android

How does this help a Shield user who is on Android(and not GNU Linux)?

I got that and Moonlight mixed up, my bad :) message edited

I know little about this, but from reading the description this sounds like a replacement for the "server" side of it (running on the machine where the game is running), but the article is talking about ending support for the client side of it on the Shield (please correct me if I am wrong)

In which case, perhaps a better replacement is something like this: https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-android

You're right, I got them completely mixed up (I was incidentally looking at streaming from Linux the other day, and googled/ported without properly reading)

Moonlight is the client :)

I use both and in my experience Gamestream is much more stable than Steam Link.

With Steam Link I keep having to change the capture method for Steam and the screen mode for the game (borderless/full screen) for different games, or the screen will be the wrong format, or show some black bars. Never had this issue with Gamestream, so that's what I always use.

After they take away this and since Plex in Server mode is mostly unusable, I don't see the point of using the Shield. Any other android box will do the simple tasks Shield still does.

(Clarifying the issue with Plex server: The Shield is great for low power and very efficient transcoding, but connection to SMB storage is broken for years. It's silly that NVIDIA doesn't fix anything, and the NVIDIA Shield official forums are absolutely full of excuses from NVIDIA devs. Meaning Plex Server is unusable unless you are connecting the Shield directly to an external USB drive).

Again, there are open-source servers and clients for multiple OS's for gamestream. Doesn't help for Shield, but still.

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