A slew of updates has been posted to the Steam In-Home Streaming community group by Valve, detailing very juicy info on what it’s all about and how it works best with users given ”complete control”.
A lot of its success is actually down to the user, with Valve cautioning against wireless networks as a solid wired connection will keep latency down. They’ll be ”randomly selecting” beta testers.
Any who subscribe to the Steam In-Home Streaming group stands a chance of being picked by Valve’s complex algorithm of ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ when it begins.
In-Home Streaming essentially lets your powerful PC rig act as a ‘server’ that pipes all that gaming goodness along the network to what device you’ve got hooked up to it, like one of Valve’s Steam Machines. It means the device you’re playing on doesn’t need to be very powerful at all because all the hard work is done by the PC instead.
”Many Steam game developers are currently working on native SteamOS titles, which will result in the best possible living room experience being delivered to their customers. In the meantime, we believe it’s important to make sure that the existing catalog of games is also available to Steam users in the living room. So we’d like to talk about in-home streaming, a way for people with good home networks to seamlessly play their Steam games anywhere in the house.”
”Steam in-home streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the player’s computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player’s computer to the game process on the remote computer.”
The crucial thing for the In-Home Streaming feature is responsiveness.
”Games are real-time experiences and often reward players with how quickly or how precisely they can respond to game events. In order for a streaming experience to be a good one, the game needs to react quickly to user input. How quickly depends on the game and the player, but in general the shorter the delay, the better the experience.”
”Responsiveness can be measured as the total round trip delay, or latency, between an action (pressing the fire button on a game controller) and seeing the result of that action (gun firing on the screen). Some latency we don’t have any control over, such as latency in third-party wireless controllers or the performance of home wireless routers,” said Valve.
”Other types of latency can be adjusted, such as switching your TV into a gaming mode or changing the streaming bandwidth settings within Steam.”
Wired Gigabit networks will provide the most latency free experience while even strong signalled wireless networks unfortunately will suffer from spikes in performance. Ultimately it depends on what resolution you have the games set to because that will determine the amount of network traffic.
”Wireless networks are the biggest challenge for streaming because most routers are designed for reliability and high bandwidth scenarios (good for downloading files and streaming movies where video and audio can be buffered) but not for low latency gaming applications. Some wireless routers can also periodically pause or take a second or two to switch from a low power to high power mode. Even if you have a good router, your wireless network may be congested with chatter from other overlapping networks or even your microwave oven.”
Check out the Steam In-Home Streaming group for more information and join for a chance at beta.
Q&A
Q: Is this like other game streaming services I’ve heard about?
A: No, you are in complete control over the hardware on both ends and the network between them. There is no data center, no subscription, and it’s completely free!
Q: Will this be fast enough for me to enjoy my favorite game?
A: This depends on your hardware, networking configuration and how fast you want it to be. It’s free, so try it out and see!
Q: Can I use this to stream games across the Internet?
A: The feature is optimized for home streaming and Internet streaming is currently not supported.
Q: Can someone use my computer while I’m streaming a game from it?
A: No, your computer is dedicated to running the game and input is coming from both the remote client and the local system. It would be very confusing if someone were trying to use the computer at the same time.
Q: How do I get selected to participate in the beta?
A: We will be randomly selecting beta test participants from community members who have joined the Steam In-Home Streaming group
