How to set up Steam in-home streaming on your PC

[Onkel Neal]

How to set up Steam in-home streaming on your PC


If you've bought Valve's Steam Link or have a cheap living room PC tucked into your entertainment center, it's time to set up Steam In-Home Streaming. Streaming is Valve's solution for running a game on your beefy desktop PC, encoding it as a video signal, and sending that video signal to another system on the same network. Think of it as Netflix being broadcast inside your house, with your Steam library (and non-Steam games you add to your library--many of them will work too!) standing in for all those movies and TV shows.

Here's what you need to know to set up your Steam Link or In-Home Streaming PC, and what you need to know to configure it for the best performance.

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-set-up-steam-in-home-streaming-on-your-pc/

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I'm looking to set this up for Christmas.

[NeonSamurai]

I would be wary of going anywhere near this technology for the next six months, as the whole concept has some serious kinks in it. First of all realistically WIFI won't cut it, which means running an Ethernet cable from your very beefy PC (either directly or through a router) to the Steam Link. I also do not understand why the heck Valve put a 100mbps port on the steam link when it really should have been a gigabyte port, that is just going to limit the system, cause lag and decrease graphics quality. Plus you need a really powerful computer to pull it off well.

Lag is also going to be a huge problem due to your computer having to encode the game's video and audio on the fly, then that video has to be transmitted over the network (which will bring other network traffic down to a crawl), read and displayed on the screen, you have to react to the game, and that signal has to be sent back down the network to the pc before the inputs register in game.

The steam controller is also a mixed bag too.

[CCIP]

Yeah, for the moment, Steam's in-home streaming is so-so, but it's improving. I have actually used it to play SH3 remotely and it worked pretty alright, but for newer games it's a lot more resource-intensive so you end up losing a lot of performance, and needing both the playing and streaming machines to be relatively powerful. Their video compression is rather inefficient and eats up network traffic as well, indeed making it tricky if you're using an ordinary Wireless G router at home.

So far, when it comes to game-streaming capabilities, at the moment Sony's technology on the PS4 seems to be the most effective. In my observation, NVidia's streaming solutions are also a lot more efficient than Steam. But like I said, I think Steam is gradually getting better at it.

[Dowly]

I don't know in detail what all this thing does, but wouldn't it be simpler to use a HDMI cable to link your telly to the PC (of course, given the PC is not too far from the TV)?

[NeonSamurai]

I don't know in detail what all this thing does, but wouldn't it be simpler to use a HDMI cable to link your telly to the PC (of course, given the PC is not too far from the TV)?

Yep infinitely better. It's not to hard to build a toaster box micro-atx computer that could do everything a lot better than a steam link etc does. Hence why Steam is trying to also market the steam box.