Red Orchestra 2 streamed from the laptop using Steam’s new In-Home Streaming
Steam’s new beta, In-Home Streaming, will allow you to play almost all the games you can play on a regular desktop/notebook. It works by using your main computer to do all the graphics rendering and processing, and then streaming it to your netbook.
All of this can be done without additional software. In order to activate your In-Home Streaming, you need to activate the Steam beta on two computers. In order to do this, open your Steam client and look for the “Steam” tab on the top-left corner. Click “Settings”. Find “Beta Participation” and click “Change…”. Once in, select “Steam Beta Update” from the drop-down menu.
Look for this in order to activate In-Home Streaming.
The streaming process means your netbook requires nothing more than a good internet connection in order to play games. However, this means that your laptop needs to have more power than usual for you to have a smooth game as it has to encode and send the video.
When Red Orchestra 2 loaded up on the netbook, it felt marvelous. Never had it seemed possible to play such a taxing game on a netbook.
However, playing an online game did show the limits of In-Home Streaming. For one, the internet connection faced many slow downs leading to lag and then suddenly speeding up. This led to the server accusing me of using a “Speed Hack”.
By default, the server compresses the video sometimes to save on bandwidth. You’ll notice a visual quality drop as compared to playing the game on your full-spec computer. The video can sometimes look like a 360p YouTube video played full-screen.
Cities in Motions 2 would not run on an ION 2-equipped netbook. Here it is being streamed.
Steam recommends that you have a minimum of a quad-core CPU for the main computer while the netbook should have a GPU that supports hardware accelerated H264 decoding. You could also lower your resolution and turn off vertical sync.
They also recommend you use a wired network although modern wireless networks work have been reported to work fine.
Steam allows you to set the quality to suit your preference. In “Settings”, you will find a tab called “In-Home Streaming”. There you can decide if you prefer to prioritize quality over smoothness and set limits to the bandwidth.
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