Currently I have a workstation with GPU passthrough setup on my main floor. The “workstation” is a ryzen 2700x build with 32 gb of ram.
I have a shitty DELL upstairs to watch movies and stuff on, but it’s slowly dying.
I have a 100+ foot ethernet cord that’s already running from my main floor where my workstation is (next to the modem + router) to my bedroom.
I would like to buy another GPU and use my third PCI-E slot for another VM, and hopefully figure out the best piece of hardware for displaying the VM on my TV in my bedroom upstairs as well as mouse/keyboard input from my bedroom as well.
Could I get a device that utilizes the ethernet cord I have running from my router on the main floor to my bedroom for this? What would be the best, most cost effective solution?
Steam in-home streaming uses NvFBC, so would make sense with a Nvidia GPU, but I think it’s for games, not really the desktop. With Steam Link disappearing, maybe that could be something to ask about? a VNC solution using Steam streaming instead of VNC protocol?
First, what’s the quality requirement? Steam Streaming is a decent solution, but there’s a lot of compression, similar to KVM over IP, something better would probably be a thunderbolt dock with one of those long active thunderbolt 3 cables.
I’ve been having a hard time finding an active cable that’s less expensive than building an entirely new system with a 2950x and a 2080 though.
You actually can stream the desktop with in-home streaming, you just have to cheat a bit. Steam Link does it by default.
Basically, you need to stream the “big picture” UI, then exit big picture.
Well, that’s one option, or they could release the internal software they used for it. That would be my preference, so I can just run it on a RPi or something like that. I’d also like to reverse engineer the in-home streaming protocol, but I’d probably run afoul of Nvidia by doing that (NvFBC is a closely guarded secret)
Do beware that these things compress to MJPEG instead of H264 over IP, and it’s not Uncompressed, and adds latency. The Uncompressed tech you’re looking for is a HDBaseT KVM.
But it gets you Uncompressed video. All other solutions are heavily compressed. HDBaseT ensures you get uncompressed video over standard ethernet cable.
Very bad, cause it would be double recompressing and MJPEG is an ancient codec only really suitable for webcam use. MJPEG would end up in ringing around text, blocky motion, and blocky gradients. H264 is honestly better, but just as heavily compressed, and both add latency.
I don’t understand why it needs so much compression. I can stream 4k video from the internet through my ethernet cord just fine. Why can’t I do the same with a desktop VM downstairs?
It’s because real-time solutions with low latency are hard to come by. Any livestream from the internet has latency.
Videos are pre-encoded and are cached, but livestreams have to be streamed to you.
Okay, so it’s clear you’re not a fan of HDBaseT, but Newtek NDI might be a thing you’re interested in. Though the KVM solution for that is only officially available with an annual subscription. The compression tech is royalty free, the KVM bundle with NDI requires an annual subscription to Newtek. NDI is low latency low compression wavelet compression over IP LAN.
Unfortunately, no one has implemented NDI in a RDP client that is free to use and open source.
Fwiw, Lindy apparently sells a pair of HDBaseT boxes that do 1080p60 for ~350.
I’d hazard a guess that a pair of fpga boards with HDMI and sufficient bandwidth over something else is more expensive (+time to research/implement).
Edit: there’s also HDMI over cat5 boxes that aren’t HDBaseT for less (e.g ~130). Any of those require full use of the cat5 cable, either you need another cable or you use the existing one and switch your network to WiFi.