Let's talk Steam In-Home Streaming (what it is, how to set it up)
Steam now supports the ability to render a game on a high-power PC, and stream that game to a thin/light client elsewhere in your home. That feature is called "Steam In-Home Streaming."
Here's how to set it up:
Go to the computer that will actually be running the game. We'll call this your "Server", and this is your big gaming PC.
Go to Steam settings and click "In-Home Streaming"
Check "Enable Streaming.
Start by selecting the "beautiful" quality, but if you find performance is sluggish/laggy when you play, come back here and set the "balanced" option.
Under advanced host options, make sure you have "enable hardware encoding." "Prioritize network traffic" is an optional measure you might take if gameplay seems laggy or unresponsive.
In advanced client options, make sure you have "automatic" bandwidth, "desktop resolution" and "enable hardware decoding" selection. Leave Steam running and logged in and walk away.
Now it's time to stream to another PC! Go find your crappy notebook that you wish was a gaming PC, but isn't, and fire up Steam on that machine. Perform steps 2-6 on this miserable old notebook. We'll call this notebook the "client."
All of the games installed on your server should now appear as "installed" on your client. If they don't appear, uncheck and recheck "enable streaming" in the settings of your client PC.
Launch a game on the client! If necessary, change the resolution of the game to match the resolution of the client so the server isn't doing more work to render and stream than needed.
I have an ultrathin AMD notebook that's great for productivity, but not for gaming. I fired up Civ 5 and Just Cause 2, and both of them ran awesome. The latency wasn't an obstacle at all, and the image quality was surprisingly light on compression artifacting! Try it!
Comments
THIS RESULTS IN AN INFINITE LOOOOP!
Also, have you done this over wifi, or wired? I've been reading that the steam streaming isn't working well over wifi yet, I'd be curious to know if this has changed. I know Valve pumps out updates like mad.
I believe @Thrax has only WIFI.
Yes, only WiFi. I have N450, with bandwidth of about 12-14 MB/s in practice.
Tried this last night and it kinda worked!
Laptop connected to TV and keyboard/mouse connected to laptop. Over WIFI, laptop doing Steam Big Picture. Streamed Payday2 from my main rig, and it functioned!
Wasn't smooth, but I was goofing around and also had a video streaming to the main computer (who's audio was also coming in through the game audio).
What I'd love to try but don't have the resources for: Make the smallest linux box just to get Steam going, attach to TV and see what happens.
My HTPC uses a 25W APU that is only designed for productivity and video playback. It's not meant for 3D gaming at all. I'll try it tonight with streaming.
I was thinking of installing SteamOS on my old Shuttle Phenom X4 box to do Streaming, but then I read that it didn't work well over WiFi and put those plans on hold. Might have to try it after all.
Side note, you can also stream non Steam games. Just add them to your library on the host computer and you can launch them on the client computer. Tested with BF4 and FFXIV:AAR.
I hear tell that you can also stream regular programs... for instance, Firefox running Netflix streaming to your HTPC which runs Linux.... or Office if you're into that kind of thing.
From what I can tell @ardichoke it operates very similar to a VNC client. I have FFXIV run as administrator which causes the UAC to pop up on the host machine. I can't click the okay button on the client side but I can see the host's desktop and icons.
This raises the question, how is it that a game released in 2010, well after the advent of UAC, requires administrator privs to run? effing squenix...
I force it to run in admin mode. I was having issues with the game updating and that seemed to fix it.
Well, that at least makes some sense as updating would require the permission to write to the install path. Still, you'd think they would just have a separate updater process that requested admin access when needed to update so that this wouldn't be necessary.
Well the lesson here is that if something triggers UAC while using the in-home streaming I don't know of a way to click Ok. I guess you could disable UAC on the host machine.
It's easy, in 2010, XP was still the dominant desktop operating system.
Wouldn't this be fixed by installing to a directory under something other than c:\Program Files?
That's the idea with UAC. Even if it does install to C:\Program Files, etc, it should still only trigger UAC for the install and updating those particular files. Files that change often should go to the virtual store or a data directory either under C:\Users\ or C:\users\Public (for any files that need to be accessible to everyone).
But most installers are written in the XP frame of mind where the installing user has rights to everywhere on the HDD.
Only if that directory was in your user directory, and if you went in and changed ownership on all the files to your user.
Aside from going to the streaming source and clicking it there, there isn't one. Disabling UAC is an option, but it's a bad security practice.
Ah, this could be why I don't have this problem. I install to a separate volume and the files are owned by my userid.
I don't use UAC because it's obnoxious. Problem solved!
I ain't sayin' you're wrong, but I ain't sayin' I approve, neither.
I'm not home to check, but if you run steam as administrator, will it bypass the UAC calls when steam tries to run another program (a la how root processes are allowed to open additional processes with root permissions)?
Alternatively, I know it's possible to create application-specific shortcuts to automatically run as administrator while bypassing UAC. If you told Steam to use these shortcuts instead of the general 'run as administrator,' that might fixya without having to go nuclear on UAC.
In that same vein, here's a link to an article that might help... using task scheduler to interrupt before UAC comes a callin': http://lifehacker.com/how-to-eliminate-uac-prompts-for-specific-applications-493128966
I'm not home to check, but if you run steam as administrator, will it bypass the UAC calls when steam tries to run another program (a la how root processes are allowed to open additional processes with root permissions)?
I don't think that will work either with non-steam games. Steam acts as the middle man to launch the .exe or what ever the game launcher is, if I am not mistaken. So if all my assumptions are correct you would have to disable UAC to get around this. What's more odd is when you launch something like BF4 or a game that has a client updater before the game opens, you can minimize the game and do what ever you like in windows, so long as it doesn't require UAC.
Tried it on my 2yr old nettop HTPC (AMD E-450 @ 1.65ghz) over wifi with games like Max Payne 3, Hitman Absolution and Civ V. Looked beautiful but at times there was an input lag of over a second. I think the nettop is a little too weak. Non input timing sensitive games like Civ should be fine. From observing the F6 graph, the red line was peaking so I'm guessing decoding was too strenuous.
I am not sure how to apply this directly to the UAC problem described but I work with a program (that stores its data in a sub-dir of program files) that we get around UAC by giving the Users group modify permissions.
So if you know what's prompting, perhaps set the directory with those perms?
If the directory is not apparent you can check for Compatibility Files. Any virtualized files will be in equivalent directories to program files and may lead you to the dir needed.
Indeed. Taking ownership of the file store that the program wants to use is a way to get around UAC prompts.
It's still not recommended practice, but it's much better than turning it off.
New IC meme: bad security advice Thrax.
Devils advocate here:
I would say everyone in this thread is smart enough not to click on shit they shouldn't. As such... why is UAC off a bad idea?
@Linc @primesuspect I think we need a discussion split.. all this has nothing to do with Steam streaming..
Because everyone makes mistakes... and UAC is there to give you a chance to save yourself from them. It's the same reason that even the most experienced Linux admins don't run as root all the time, it's just too easy to make a mistake and having to escalate priviliges (and be aware that you're doing it) is a way to make you think just a little harder about what you're doing.
I think it does though. Some game launchers have bugs that require a user to run as Admin. With Steam streaming you can't use UAC and as a result there needs to be a warning about the hazards involving disabling the feature of Windows as well as ways to safely get around it.
UAC is not a 'security boundary' in practice, though it is by effect. It's much deeper than that.
Steven Sinofsky (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/02/05/update-on-uac.aspx) and Mark Russinovich (http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2007/02/12/638372.aspx) have both written about it pretty extensively.
The upshot is that UAC makes Windows function the way it should have in the first place (much like most *nix systems have been functioning for many years). An administrator can do whatever s/he wants, and only gets prompted when a program does something that does not fit proper Windows functional guidelines, whether that has to do with overall security or not is irrelevant. The 9x and XP model of "Everyone gets access to everything!" is a Bad Thing™, and Vista+ fixed that. On the other side of it, using a limited account in XP would cause many elevation-requiring functions to simply fail silently, which is yet another Bad Thing™.
The reason people are annoyed by it is that they've literally been using the system incorrectly from the start, and changing to proper usage is painful because any change in usage habits is painful.
My question to this is: Is it the streaming creating the UAC prompt, or the actual launching of the game. If it's the streaming, then it can be problematic, but if it's just launching the game, changing the install location of the game in Steam should alleviate many of the issues related to UAC and remote viewing.
From my understanding, streaming is simply piping the output to another device. The issue occurs because Steam is operating as the user and is prevented from interacting with UAC. It's a protection put in place to keep malicious programs from simply adding code to quickly click accept on the UAC dialog to allow themselves access. I believe it is the same problem that Synergy used to have with UAC dialogs, as soon as one popped up, you would lose the ability to interact with that computer through Synergy until you used a local keyboard or mouse to dismiss the UAC dialog.