Stream My Game

[Big Gulp]

Don't really want to shill too much here, but I figured some of you could get some use out of this service (Sky, I'm looking at you).  Basically, you run any game you want on whatever rig you want and you can stream the video over your home network to any other computer.  All keyboard/mouse commands are sent back over the network to the server computer.  Minimal lag so far from what I've seen, and this lets me use the outdated media computer hooked up to my TV as a dumb client that'll play anything my main box will.  It's like $9.99 a year for those of us with modest 1280X720 resolution TVs, but for $19.99 you can go to insane resolutions.  Ought to be nice for those of you with underpowered note/netbooks too.

[Mrbloodworth]

There are so many errors on that site, its not funny.

[Venkman]

So this is basically a LAN-only OnLive kinda thing? Why would they charge more for higher resolution when the only network being hammered is your own?

I would like to see something like this work. However, it does beg the requirement for keyboard and mouse from the couch. Which then makes me hope for a day when I can play a console shooter with a keyboard and mouse

[Big Gulp]

So this is basically a LAN-only OnLive kinda thing? Why would they charge more for higher resolution when the only network being hammered is your own?

Gotta suck up the dollars somehow, and they probably figure people will pay it.  For a year's subscription that's not too outrageous.  I've gotta say, though, the software really does work as advertised.  It's great.

[caladein]

Why would they charge more for higher resolution when the only network being hammered is your own?

See, well listen to, second half of this Planet Money episode.  (Big Gulp's got it right, but it just came out yesterday and was about the same question.)

[Kageh]

I tried to calculate a bit and I'm not sure about the bandwidth this would need to stream 60 frames per second at 1680x1050 with EAX sound, but it probably is a lot.

Assuming video only, 1680x1050 (roughly 1.8 mil pixels) and 32-bit per color per pixel that is about 8MB/sec sustained, without any sound and without controls polling, is that correct? I'm not sure about encoding or compression, I just assumed broadcasting every frame, as compression and decompression at this resolution would too resource-intensive. That would choke wireless 802.11b networks and can prove problematic, depending on the distance to the AP, on 802.11g networks as well.