Streaming Non-Steam Games and Streaming Software

[DeathTBO]

Do the games have to be on Steam to stream them, or can I stream Starcraft 2 from computer to computer. Also, would it be limited to games, or could you stream software as well.

[DeathTBO]

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

[Lirilì Larilà]

what is there's something that makes it only work with the games itself controlling somehow their data that doesn't allow non-steam games to work

[Stride]

I read that you could stream windows games from a PC to a steam box.

[Lirilì Larilà]

i hope it will workwith non-steam games

[DeathTBO]

I just checked (by logging into my laptop and desktop) and the non-Steam games did not have an option. I hope Valve adds one.

[Cynagen (58/300β)]

We likely won't see non steam games streaming for one major reason, lag. The only way to minimize it on the rendering machine is to cut back on video capture and encoding. They can hook into the renderer of any game they already control and thus bypass the need to read the video card framebuffer, then encode, they can just encode directly. Capturing the games that aren't steam would require a capture layer, thus increasing the load on the host machine. Think xterm via ssh vs xsplit.

[DeathTBO]

That is true, but as technology gets better, it would be nice to have that option.

[McSetty]

Originally posted by Cynagen (Beta Machine #58):

We likely won't see non steam games streaming for one major reason, lag. The only way to minimize it on the rendering machine is to cut back on video capture and encoding. They can hook into the renderer of any game they already control and thus bypass the need to read the video card framebuffer, then encode, they can just encode directly. Capturing the games that aren't steam would require a capture layer, thus increasing the load on the host machine. Think xterm via ssh vs xsplit.

How do you know this given the information they've provided? How do you know that they aren't just doing a remote desktop/vnc session with better compression? In which case it wouldn't matter what was being captured and streamed.

[DeathTBO]

I think he was refering to this: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements/detail/1496614934735532043

[McSetty]

Originally posted by DeathTBO:

I think he was refering to this: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements/detail/1496614934735532043

That doesn't really seem to contain any implementation information other than the system will consist of a computer that captures input and displays video and another system that will do the rendering. I see nothing where it states that the software will capture at any specific layer of the rendering system. This still leads me to believe that this is no different than say splashtop only that it won't display a whole desktop and instead a specific window.

I believe other than hardware encoding (which could be different in this case) NVIDIA shield worked in a similar way. They did mark certain games as "supported" but I think this was purely because they were tested not because any code needed to be changed in the games themselves.

[DeathTBO]

The Nvidia Shield can stream games? I thought it was a thing you could plug in your Android phone to make it like a controller.

[DeathTBO]

I just looked up the Nvidia Shield, and now I agree that it shouldn't be any less laggy to stream a non Steam game. I hope Valve adds support for this.

[Lirilì Larilà]

remember shield only uses nvidia gpu's because of an encoding thet thae have thet is better for streaming and not all their gpu's are supported

[8BitCerberus]

Not all of the Nvidia's have the h264 hardware, no, but most of the 600 series and all of the 700's and Titans have it. That'll also most likely continue with any future cards. Most recent Intel HD Graphics also have built in h264 (they call it QuickSync) that pretty much any Intel motherboard with onboard graphics in the past 3 years will have. ATI's had something for hardware encoding since the Radeon 4800s, and they're leverageing OpenCL now as well.

Basically every GPU that SteamOS gold will support has hardware encoding built in. Though that doesn't guarantee someone's 8 year old just-die-already-I-need-a-new-PC machine they've been limping along on will be able to stream games to SteamOS. However, there's also nothing stopping Valve from putting out minimum hardware requirements for streaming, to ensure that the machine doing the streaming is capable.