Steam in home streaming

Logan, could you guys maybe do a video on the new Steam In-Home Streaming protocol? It is in open beta now, and I am curious to see if you guys come up with some clever ways to optimize it on your network. For example, does a particular resolution look good across all devices? Also, what would it take to stream to a 1.3ghz single core laptop? Could I set it up as some sort of thin client to my main PC? I have it (its about a decade old) and I don't have anything better to do with it.

Thanks,

Hampton

i've tried in home streaming to an old laptop. small i3, i think its like 2nd gen core. it works reasonable well but the main thing you need is serious network throughput. especially if you are going to use wifi. over wire, not much of an issue really. but over wifi, definately N or AC. i'm on G and it worked, actually pretty well but could tell it was bottlenecked

I participated in the steam in home streaming closed beta, and I can answer some of this. Prioritize the two computers that are being used for streaming, 720p generally looks good, and there is no way you can stream to a 1.3 ghz laptop. It takes quite a bit of power to decode the video stream reliably. The weakest computer I could manage it on was a 2.4 ghz i5 2430m laptop. I also tested it on an ivy bridge i3 and it ran flawlessly. I also recommend wired connection unless your wifi is really powerful.

were you streaming windows to windows?

yes

I've ran this at home already. It works very well, and no lag from any of the games I tried. My setup is wired with a gigabit switch. Ran the game remotely as the normal 1080p res and high settings like I was at the main machine.

i was able to achieve playable frame rate on lower spec hardware than you could. but my client was running linux mint 16 cinnamon

Do you all know if this can stream Windows to OS X?

maybe, but maybe steam optimized it more as well. Last time I messed with it was back in February. Although I expect linux mint to be better than windows 7.

Worked perfectly for me on a 1.9Ghz Phenom HP laptop

Yes, any platform that the Steam client will run on (besides ARM/iOS/Android) will stream. You can stream OSX>Windows or Windows>OSX, either way will work, as long as the client PC can decode the stream fast enough (basically any cheap dualcore or better works fine).

Were you using Big Picture? In my experience that slowed it down, because on the server PC it opens big picture as well (seems pointless) and then it has big picture running in the background and also the game, I have gone to using the desktop Steam client to stream, because it works a lot better. Any tips to make Big Picture mode work better?