In-home game streaming

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battletoad

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I'm looking to hear anyone's experience with game streaming.

I've wifi at the moment which tends to be awful, but thinking about setting up a tiny LAN for computers and laptops.

So:
1. Your setup (wifi, 100Mbps/Gigabit LAN, switch, etc.)
2. Latency. is there a marked delay with IO?
 
Your post is confusing. Are you trying to set up a LAN or are you trying to stream games, or both?
 
Wifi won't make a difference, given the dismal state of uploading via ADSL in SA. I assume you're using ADSL?
 
Bryn said:
Your post is confusing. Are you trying to set up a LAN or are you trying to stream games, or both?
Click to expand...

Sinbad said:
Wifi won't make a difference, given the dismal state of uploading via ADSL in SA. I assume you're using ADSL?
Click to expand...

Suppose you have a powerhouse pc (hereafter server) which can play any title, and an htpc which isn't that capable of gaming. On your local network, you can basically play a game on your htpc but have the heavy lifting done on your server. So your controllers/keyb+mouse will be connected at your htpc, and your input is sent thru to your server. The server then streams the result back to your htpc. Think thin-client gaming.

Here's some guy testing it out

So the question is, does anyone here have any experience on this wrt latency, specifically the I/O or even the types of games where it falters, on a wired network?
 
ahhhh right.

For that I'd use wired gigabit :p
 
Sinbad said:
ahhhh right.

For that I'd use wired gigabit :p
Click to expand...

I'm considering saving my chops off for infiniband!:p

I have a sneaking suspicion beat-em-up's will suck with a setup as such. Hence, my question about peep's experiences with it.
 
A couple of times I have fired up my 10" netbook and used the Steam In-Home streaming with good results over WiFi. I did not look at the data transfer rate during the streaming process, but once in a while there will be a hick-up of some sorts.

With a wired network it will be better, but be warned... I did replace my switches a couple of times and my server is currently running on its 4th network card, and my HTPC on its 2nd. For some reason lighting fried the replaced components, even my network card in my gaming PC experienced some faulty connection issues.

For the above reason I have not yet connected my Xbox and PS3 on the wired network. Also I wanted to buy some of those micro ATX motherboard but they do not have space for a GPU and a extra network card. The same story with the Gigabyte Brix. If the wired connection get fried, you are stuck with a WiFi connection, and for some reason video files that are larger than +-5GB tends to get laggy on playback over my WiFi setup.

I have one PC running on those TP Link Ethernet power adapters and it is a lot better than the WiFi but it is slower than a normal wired connection (gigabit) and for some reason it fluctuates between 8MB/s and 16MB/s transfer speeds. This has been running for about 9 months now, and nothing fried yet :)
 
I tried it over wifi and over ethernet: ethernet was a truckload better. Also, I tried it using an old celeron dual core machine over ethernet versus my MacBook Air over wifi and it performed better on the MacBook. It seems like using a really slow machine makes a big difference. I assumed that as long as the machine could playback a video stream, it should be fine but no.

The issues I experienced mainly was lag on wifi but ethernet was almost the same as being on the host PC.
 
EXhale1N said:
A couple of times I have fired up my 10" netbook and used the Steam In-Home streaming with good results over WiFi. I did not look at the data transfer rate during the streaming process, but once in a while there will be a hick-up of some sorts.

With a wired network it will be better, but be warned... I did replace my switches a couple of times and my server is currently running on its 4th network card, and my HTPC on its 2nd. For some reason lighting fried the replaced components, even my network card in my gaming PC experienced some faulty connection issues.

For the above reason I have not yet connected my Xbox and PS3 on the wired network. Also I wanted to buy some of those micro ATX motherboard but they do not have space for a GPU and a extra network card. The same story with the Gigabyte Brix. If the wired connection get fried, you are stuck with a WiFi connection, and for some reason video files that are larger than +-5GB tends to get laggy on playback over my WiFi setup.

I have one PC running on those TP Link Ethernet power adapters and it is a lot better than the WiFi but it is slower than a normal wired connection (gigabit) and for some reason it fluctuates between 8MB/s and 16MB/s transfer speeds. This has been running for about 9 months now, and nothing fried yet :)
Click to expand...

ah, those highveld thunderstorms suck!

Which type of games were fine over wifi? I'm thinking your SF4's, FIFA's, FPS's will have a noticeable delay, or one where your gameplay suffers.

I had a look at those ethernet over powerlines; apparently they need to be on the same circuit at your home. But what really deterred me was the price, iirc they were R800 each! I've 3 pcs, 3 laptops, 2 pi's, so thats money better spent getting a resilient AP(s) or, with a little more saving, a proper ethernet setup. Those speeds you're getting look great if you're referring to megaBYTES/sec, thats slightly faster than normal 100Mb/s :)
 
vinodh said:
I tried it over wifi and over ethernet: ethernet was a truckload better. Also, I tried it using an old celeron dual core machine over ethernet versus my MacBook Air over wifi and it performed better on the MacBook. It seems like using a really slow machine makes a big difference. I assumed that as long as the machine could playback a video stream, it should be fine but no.

The issues I experienced mainly was lag on wifi but ethernet was almost the same as being on the host PC.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the client pc needs to be powerful enough to decode the video streams fast enough. That's probably why the celeron suffered a bit.

Cool, shot guys. Looks like I have a LAN project coming up soon :D
 
Bryn said:
Your post is confusing. Are you trying to set up a LAN or are you trying to stream games, or both?
Click to expand...

Sinbad said:
Wifi won't make a difference, given the dismal state of uploading via ADSL in SA. I assume you're using ADSL?
Click to expand...

Lol guys in the thread title he mentioned in home streaming.

My first thought was steam supports already.
 
battletoad said:
Suppose you have a powerhouse pc (hereafter server) which can play any title, and an htpc which isn't that capable of gaming. On your local network, you can basically play a game on your htpc but have the heavy lifting done on your server. So your controllers/keyb+mouse will be connected at your htpc, and your input is sent thru to your server. The server then streams the result back to your htpc. Think thin-client gaming.

Here's some guy testing it out

So the question is, does anyone here have any experience on this wrt latency, specifically the I/O or even the types of games where it falters, on a wired network?
Click to expand...

I would just wait until the Steam Link is available and buy that. It's a tiny box that streams games to your TV.
 
Bryn said:
I would just wait until the Steam Link is available and buy that. It's a tiny box that streams games to your TV.
Click to expand...

it looks as large as a portable hdd, tho slightly more square. Googling suggests it'll be about $50, which is awesome :)

The same question regarding networking suffices tho.
 
battletoad said:
I'm looking to hear anyone's experience with game streaming.

I've wifi at the moment which tends to be awful, but thinking about setting up a tiny LAN for computers and laptops.

So:
1. Your setup (wifi, 100Mbps/Gigabit LAN, switch, etc.)
2. Latency. is there a marked delay with IO?
Click to expand...

steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/522728268973421298/ this is my Wireless Setup i used at that time.

Streamed "Sniper Elite V2" in ULTRA HIGH END to my laptop. sitting right next to me is a different monitor and keyboard mouse played on my laptop while keeping eye on my desktop screen NO LAG :D
 
EXhale1N said:
A couple of times I have fired up my 10" netbook and used the Steam In-Home streaming with good results over WiFi. I did not look at the data transfer rate during the streaming process, but once in a while there will be a hick-up of some sorts.

With a wired network it will be better, but be warned... I did replace my switches a couple of times and my server is currently running on its 4th network card, and my HTPC on its 2nd. For some reason lighting fried the replaced components, even my network card in my gaming PC experienced some faulty connection issues.

For the above reason I have not yet connected my Xbox and PS3 on the wired network. Also I wanted to buy some of those micro ATX motherboard but they do not have space for a GPU and a extra network card. The same story with the Gigabyte Brix. If the wired connection get fried, you are stuck with a WiFi connection, and for some reason video files that are larger than +-5GB tends to get laggy on playback over my WiFi setup.

I have one PC running on those TP Link Ethernet power adapters and it is a lot better than the WiFi but it is slower than a normal wired connection (gigabit) and for some reason it fluctuates between 8MB/s and 16MB/s transfer speeds. This has been running for about 9 months now, and nothing fried yet :)
Click to expand...

i can also watch 1080p Broadcasts on Steam or Google Chrome Browser ...... 512 Kilobytes {contention Ratio 5:1}
 
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