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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about in-home streaming. To me, this is something I've wanted for years. I've got a state-of-the-art machine I like to keep in my basement (cooling), and with this I'll (hopefully) be able to play hardware-intense games on my media center PC upstairs.

Just crossing my fingers that my 5-10Mbit powerline network is good enough.

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The beta for Home-streaming appears to be separate from the SteamBox beta[1]. If you're interested in that, you should keep an eye out at the homestream group on Steam[2].

[1] http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements/de...

[2] http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#

Thanks!

No problem! I'm excited to see how this is all going to play out.

Not something I've ever desired. Either in the home or externally rendered. In the home there's absolutely no way my consumer hardware is going to to keep up with 1080p or 2160p streaming over a network (heck HDMI barely manages), and externally there's no way you can possibly play a game with the sort of latency (400ms+) you get on Australian internet connections.

I can see why it would be attractive if you had a basement, but why not just run a DisplayPort cable and USB?

Consumer hardware handles 1080p streaming over a network just fine, have you ever seen an Nvidia shield?

It streams PC games in 1080p to the mobile device and the control is then sent back to the PC game. It works surprisingly well.

He was talking about the future, and he's correct - what's gonna happen with 4k?

One of two things. 1) Network speeds and latency never improve, and it remains forever impossible to stream 4k video. In this scenario, we can still stream current "HD" video. 2) Network capacity improves, like it always has. 4k video is no problem.

> The bit rate of the uncompressed 4K video stream can exceed 6 Gbit/s, which can be transmitted via a 10 Gbit/s network

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=444594...

So we're already there, as long as you're set up for 10Gbit ethernet.

I'm not too concerned. To my reckoning, a 4k TV plus hardware that can render high-quality 4k games real-time is quite a ways away, and network hardware will continue to develop along the way.

You can do both quite comfortably now. There's affordable (sub $2000 USD) 4K TVs, and consumer cards can push out 4L video if you gang them together. It's not really out of the range of possibility, I've been investigating making a setup capable of it in the very near future.

You're looking at quite a lot of hardware investment, yes. I'd say around $1500 for graphics cards alone, if you want to run at high/ultra settings at 60 FPS. You could probably get away with a single 780 ti or a single 290x if you were fine with 30 frames per second or decreased quality settings.

I was going to aim for a single GPU just to avoid having to deal with having such a wide block of coolers. It's something I'll have to experiment with a bit I think, I haven't built a computer in years. Last time I did I was using AGP cards rather than three slot monsters drawing half a kilowatt.

I'm quite happy spending money if it's something quality and will last a reasonable amount of time. I consciously avoid buying cheap things that I will dispose of in a year.

why not just run a DisplayPort cable and USB?

The "client" machine is on the 2nd floor, on the other corner of the house.

I'm with you for off-site rendering, but I am optimistic for in-home. The latency is good, and even if we can only stream 720p games around the house, that's still valuable to me. My media PC is pretty formidable for what it is, but there are still plenty of games that have to be run on at low resolution with very low detail.

It can be very nice to be able to sit on the couch on your laptop and play games with the power of your PC. Me and some friends are almost done with development of a streaming solution that works pretty much like this (Based on NVIDIA Gamestream, used by the Shield) and given a good network, there is practically no delay and it is very playable.

I tried Onlive multiple time and I can play perfectly well even if I connect to a server hundred of KM away using wifi on my phone. Why can't I do the same on my own 1 gbit network at home? Yeah you won't achieve the best latency but it can't be worst than the latency to the servers of Onlive so it's more than perfect for me.

The DisplayPort idea is not bad, except that my ethernet cable are already placed and my TV can't connect to a DisplayPort.

I'm hoping this will eventually work for streaming games over 802.11n from my PC to a Mac laptop. After testing with ping for a while, I think it'd work for any game that can tolerate the occasional spike from 5ms to 15-20ms latency.

It should have the advantages of being able to play every game, in better quality, without making the laptop uncomfortably hot.

The hangup with 802.11n is it's simplex nature. That's actually why I got the powerline adapters; SMB performance was poor for anything but sequential access.

I have this one and it's very very good. And it's just 22.99

http://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Powerline-Ethernet-Adapter-TL-...

Wow, they've come down in price! I actually wound up with 200Mbps TP-Link adapters, because the 500Mbps adapters fall off to fast with distance in my house. AV2 adapters are supposed to sustain performance better over distance, so I'm biding my time and waiting for those to mature a bit.

Yess. I've been wanting this for years as well, I've done various experiments with remote control software over LAN and none have really worked pleasantly. All of them seem to flunk when given full screen games, and the others are just slow when resorting to windowed games.

Not sure on the bandwidth/latency you'd need to be able to play, but this is already these guys' bread & butter:

http://www.splashtop.com/personal

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