Hacker News Reader

Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

Okay this all sounds great, what specs do I need on the machine connected to the TV? Will a Raspberry Pi 3 work? Pine64? Atomic Pi? (That's x86_64, intel Celeron)

Anything more than that and the value proposition goes way down. For every 50 grams lighter I am willing to lose 1fps. For every fan removed I will drop an entire resolution (4k -> 2k -> FHD...) Change "lighter" to heavier if it makes sense. My comfort and aesthetic matters more than competition quality, pixel perfect yadda

I keep starring these remote display projects but none have convinced me to provision a client machine for the purpose yet.

View on HN

It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key.

I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go.

My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-speed wifi should also work fine, but almost always try to keep the PC end (Sunshine) hard-wired.

Lossless scaling requires some horsepower though

the gaming machine can handle all that, as i currently use it with a steam link (mentioned elsewhere) which means it's scaled from 4k/2k to 1080p or 720p depending on what TV i'm on. I'm sure i can run 4k (with a dummy hdmi dongle as i don't have a 4k plugged in to this pc anymore) with moonlight/sunlight/etc because i can do it with remote desktop!

thanks, i have fiber and copper at the TVs. not in a pretty, or impressive way, i just have a switch next to the sets is all. fiber is impervious to most lightning strikes.

I got some hardware, someone else mentioned h264/265 hard requirements, but there were codecs before that for FHD that even a pi model B could handle (among them x264 i imagine). My main viewscreen is 720p60, DLP, it's real sensitive to artifacts in the visual output being literally glaring. doesn't take much horsepower to move 720p60 relative to fhd or 4k, imo; but here i am, hands out, begging for solutions!

I imagine it's related to what Sunshine/Moonlight is compatible with.

In terms of codecs, Pi4 is the best option (out of the Pi family) for hardware video decoders, Pi5 removed some hardware decoders which is unfortunate.

At a minimum anything with h264 hardware decoding. H265, and VC1 hardware decoding supported but optional. It depends on what your output is. Networking wise, cabled is the best latency and bandwidth wise but wireless also works but can be unpredictable depending on usage and environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com