Experiences with an Asus Eee Box as a streaming client

[tendonut]

Just throwing this out there. Maybe I can get some recommendations on improving this.

Specs:
Model: EB1503
Processor: Intel® Atom™ D2550 Dual-Core Processor
Chipset: Intel® NM10
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce GT610M 512MB
RAM: 2GB
Network: Gigabit

My overall experiences have been pretty horrible. When streaming pretty much anything, my display latency is in the high 200's, low 300's. I am feeling like the bottleneck here is the processor. According to the debug tool, every game I've tried gets a great framerate (30-60fps, depending on the game) at 720p and 1080p, but even with the alleged framerate, the video is a slideshow.

Has anyone had any positive experiences with similar hardware? It was installed via Ye Olde Steam OSe, so there are some extra packages involved.

[HeikkiH]

Hi LM. I have Zbox ID41
Integrated Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz Dual-Core
Chipset Intel® NM10 Express
Graphics: Next Generation NVIDIA® ION™ (w/512MB DDR3 memory)
Ram: 2 GB
Network: Gigabit wired.

AFAIK my client is less powerful than yours. I dont have any problems to stream 60 fps to my tv with 1368*768 resolution. I use Ubuntu 13.10. Display latency is around 30 ms for example in Sleeping Dogs.

[tendonut]

Do you have Hardware Decoding enabled or disabled? I'm wondering if the video drivers I am using do not allow hardware decoding...

[HeikkiH]

Hw decoding is enabled. You can check if Steam is using hw to decode from the hosts Steam folder/logs. Open streaming_log.txt. There should be string "VDPAU" if nvidias hw decoding is used.

Your card definitely supports hw decoding. It can be tested by using vainfo program from the terminal. It will list supported hw decoding profiles. If it isnt available from the SteamOS repositories you can find it in Debian repositories in package libva.

[Evin]

If you performance sucks, on your main computer alt tab out of the game and close down all your windows and then alt tab back in, seems to give me a major performance gain on the pc i'm streaming to. (or just simply doing that without closing anything helps)

[tendonut]

Heh, what do you know. It's not actually doing hardware decoding. It's just software. I'll work on getting that working next. vdpauinfo shows me a profile, so at least some of the components are there.

[tendonut]

It's definitely a client issue. I have a Core 2 Duo laptop lying around and I get great performance when streaming to that. It's just the SteamOS client I have that isn't doing well, but I am on the right track to fix that.

[8BitCerberus]

I was going to say, definitely sounded like it's not hardware decoding for some reason. Keep us posted on a fix if you find one, would be great to see some results from the least expensive hardware options available. Since before the streaming beta, I've been under the assumption that as long as the box has hardware h264 decoding, it should be able to handle streaming no problem. I definitely expect to see small AppleTV/Roku like ~$100 streaming only Steam Machines available.

[arcadesdude]

I have a single core 1.6ghz atom Asus EEE pc (1000he) which I've hackentoshed/dual boot win xp/mac osx 10.5 I get about 15.5 fps and 160ms latency...it's to be expected since it is a very low end netbook. That's on the windows side. I have yet to try it on the mac side or wired directly to the network. (My host pc is a beast win 7, 3770k @4.6ghz, 16gb ram, ssds w/850mbps + write speed etc). Overall I can play Scribblenauts Unlimited and similar games which won't run on my netbook at all but they work fine with streaming. Got to say that is pretty impressive right there.

[Bloodred]

I have an Acer Aspire One D270 with an Atom N2600 and Intel GMA 3600 integrated GPU (absolute trash pretty much, can't even handle Big Picture at all) and it manages to stream games smoothly at 30FPS 576p (desktop res is 1024x600). 720p works too but isn't as smooth. There were a few things to do before it started working well though:

• Set audio sample rate on host to 44.1kHz (from 96kHz)
  
• Keep the Steam overlay CLOSED, the tiny thing can't handle it
  
• Set bandwidth to 5Mbps, FPS to 30 and limit streaming to desktop res (which translates to 576p)

I'm really quite impressed to be honest. I can play graphically intensive games on the little thing.

[tendonut]

So it definitely appears like hardware decoding is enabled, but Steam just doesn't use it. To confirm, I installed VLC and enabled hardware decoding and had great success. My office is closed today due to weather (Yay central NC!) so I have some time to mess with it.

[tendonut]

No go..turns out my problem was I was using the MESA drivers, not the actual NVIDIA drivers. I got hardware encoding working, but I am not seeing a performance difference. Framerate is still the same (great) according to the debug overlay, but the display latency is still high (188ms or so). The same cable plugged into my laptop gives me a display latency of around 30ms.

Just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles, I cranked the resolution from 720p up to 1080p and see the framerate drop and the display latency double.

[Bloodred]

Have you checked your audio sample rate settings on the host? Does the frame rate actually feel smooth or is it just displaying a high frame rate? Any frames dropped? Same performance with the streaming overlay both on and off?

If I try 60FPS on my netbook it displays 58.8 FPS with ~50% frame drop, so pretty much 30FPS anyway.

[tendonut]

I have not checked the audio sampling rate yet. It is displaying a high framerate, but it is most definitely not smooth. The display latency is high, and I can't remember how many frames were dropped. I'll check on the other variables you're asking for this evening.

[tendonut]

Here's what I've got.

I've got 79% frame loss when streaming 720p. Latency is 0.20 Input, 120ms game (not normal, usually 20ms or so) and 287ms display. Same performance with/without overlay on.

Audio is 2 channel, with a sample rate at 44100

I'm also noticing it doesn't reliably do hardware decoding. Looking at the streaming_log on my gaming rig, it seems to flip between software and hardware encoding as it pleases. I am not making any changes to the configuration at all.

EDIT: Typos

[HeikkiH]

Propably there is something weird in clients OS side going. If you have spare time you could test running some other os from usb stick. Maybe SteamOS is some how the problem.