Why use this?

[Is It?]

I'm struggling to find a valid reason for using this over Splashtop - Apart from the requirement to be in a window, I'm finding Splashtop to be superior in pretty much everything - picture quality, sound, latency...

If I'm missing something, please enlighten me - I want to believe... but I just can't quite see the point.

[s.plisskin [Linux Decker]]

Probably because of their EULA and privacy policy and i've read they have security issues.

[zombierevel]

I am new on streaming so dont know many aplications for it. Is there a free version of Splashtop? And does it support all graphics cards (Nvidia and AMD)?. I am interested in the fat that it works on tablets.

[XÆЯO_Vince]

Actually, I've found In-Home Streaming to offer higher framerate than Splashtop for gaming. I can actually get a full 60 FPS stream with IHS whereas Splashtop feels more like 30-35 FPS, even when SharpFPS is set to 60 in the registry. That being said, I still have Splashtop and Teamviewer installed, because those products do a better job at streaming the Windows desktop, whereas desktop streaming with IHS requires unsupported tricks and isn't the greatest experience with low FPS.

[lomax696969]

The reason for me. It's to play in my living room on my pc in the basement. So, I can play and stay with my girl friend, far away from noise, on a better screen and a better cooling for my pc.

[davew_uk]

I did some comparisons last night - Splashtop uses about 50% of my quad core CPU and gives me around 20fps in game at the native resolution of my laptop (1440x900). The latency was way above what I'd call acceptable, really noticeable if not unplayable. It was also using around 3mb/s of bandwidth, so the image quality was highly compressed. By contrast I can do 720p at 30fps with no noticeable latency with SHS and with much better image quality. Splashtop also doesn't support fullscreen exclusive mode, so in order to test it I had to find a game that used a borderless window.

I know that splashtop has special features that activate only on hosts with Nvidia graphics cards that are supposed to lower the latency and CPU consumption. My laptop has an Nvidia chipset and I would say that splashtop is definately snappier when the laptop is the host, but my gaming PC is AMD. I really don't like the way that Nvidia is trying to own this space (with splashtop, shield, shadowplay etc.) and I much prefer Valve's open, platform-agnostic approach.

[mun5mun4]

check this post

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/540733524405776833/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnJ6EpDp8dU

it is possible!

[Kalldrexx]

I have used Splashtop to remotely play games to my laptops and Windows RT tablets for 3 months so far, and have been actively playing around with Steam in-home streaming for the past week and a half. Note that I'm not using the beta steam client so there may be fixes down the pipe that I don't have yet (I got annoyed at keeping both desktop and laptop steam clients in sync).

My use case is I have a desktop gaming rig hooked up to my TV, and i use streaming (both methods) to play games on low power laptops/tablets around my house (and occasionally outside of my house)

That being said, here are the pros to Steam in house streaming:
1) It's *much* clearer. Splashtop gives a little bit of a washed out view due to the video compression (not terrible by any means though, just slightly noticeable). Steam streaming is just much clearer and in a good network much smoother framerate.

2) Splashtop does not work well with mouse look style games. Even with a Nvidia cpu (allowing full screen gaming) the mouse sensitivity has issues due to the way they deal with mouse input and the cursor. Steam deals with the mouse properly and thus I have had no problem with FPS games and other mouse-look oriented games. That contrasts to Splashtop where it's impossible, and the only way I have been able to FPS game remotely is by having a wireless 360 controller hooked up to my gaming rig and not being too far for it to work (which is an acceptable trade-off to me but probably not for most)

3) I had to have my controller hooked up to the gaming rig instead of the client machine I was streaming to due to splashtop not passing the gamepad input over the wire. I could never get it working nor could I get a clear indication of if it was even possible. Supposedly it's trivial to do in Steam.

4) On my home network with a single band router Splashtop gave me delayed sound (like a second or two off). I could never get the sound to be properly synced with the visuals and it got pretty annoying that I had to buy a wireless headset I keep connected to my desktop and use that for sound. Steam so far has seem to keep the sound in sync without affecting the visual quality

Here are the cons to Steam streaming compared to splashtop
1) Much easier to get setup to game outside of your network. I have quite a few turn based games I like to play that don't require super low latency and being able to play those smoothly from multiple states away is great (hell I was literally halfway around the world remotely playing games while on vacation a few weeks ago). Supposedly this can be done with steam but requires some complicated VPN setups that don't always seem to work judging by the threads.

2) I have had periods where Steam would send me visuals but never send input back, requiring me to alt+tab to kill the stream session and restart it (at least I"m assuming that was the cause, I saw visuals idling but could never do anything and I haven't learned how to read the chart and stats properly yet). I've never had this problem with Splashtop, if splashtop stopped working most likely my net/local connection is messing up.

3) Steam streaming seems to not work well if your computer is locked. This makes it hard if your computer isn't on and running at all times, and means if you remote desktop into your machine you completely lock yourself out of steam streaming. I've had to use Splashtop to unlock my machine so that I could use steam streaming.

4) To go with #3 a bit, Splashtop makes it easy to set things up to remotely wake up your computer, so I don't have to keep my gaming rig running 100%. It's certainly possible to do without splashtop, but it's not totally trivial and you still have to get logged into the machine somehow.

There are probably points I am missing, but that's probably the gist of it. I keep ping ponging back and forth between the two, and there's no clear winner between them two. That being said, steam streaming is free and Splashtop is free (cheap if you want internet streaming) so I don't see a downside of maintaining both

[XÆЯO_Vince]

You can make first person games work in Splashtop without the mouse sensitivity going crazy by using a program called Synergy, and properly setting up hotkeys that switch and lock the mouse and keyboard input to either the client or server and enabling a feature called "relative mouse movements." Prior to getting my IHS invite, that is what I used to stream my games.

Its possible to improve the Splashtop framerate when running the Linux version of Splashtop Personal by adding the a registry entry on the Windows server PC called "SharpFPS" and setting the decimal value to 60. Doing this still doesn't stream FPS as smooth as IHS but its better and more like 30 FPS.

Still, I prefer In-Home Streaming but I still have to use TeamViewer now and then to "fix" IHS when it glitches or a UAC prompt pops up and IHS loses focus.

[Kalldrexx]

Interesting, never thought about synergy to fix the mouse movements. I searched everywhere for a solution but never came across that idea. Thanks.

[DiamondPugs]

Originally posted by Kaltern:

I'm struggling to find a valid reason for using this over Splashtop - Apart from the requirement to be in a window, I'm finding Splashtop to be superior in pretty much everything - picture quality, sound, latency...

If I'm missing something, please enlighten me - I want to believe... but I just can't quite see the point.

Because most people getting SteamOS or buying a Steam Machine don't want to install and configure a 3rd party software, but rather just hit the play button out of the box?

[davew_uk]

@Kalldrex
Splashtop now supports gamepad inputs over the connection on Windows. Get the latest streamer version (2.5.0.1?) and follow the instructions here:

https://support-splashtoppersonal.splashtop.com/entries/25600766

You will need Microsoft's Xbox controller software installed on both the host and client PCs. I never managed to get it to work in Android however.

[Kalldrexx]

Thanks for the link, I missed that too in my searching.