Playing video games remotely has gotten surprisingly good lately, so this week we decided to sit down and figure out the what's what of home game streaming. From older options like Steam Link to the Parsecs and Moonlights of today, not to mention some of the recent high-quality, low-latency backend tech that's making it possible, there's a lot to unpack. Join us! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Playing video games remotely has gotten surprisingly good lately, so this week we decided to sit down and figure out the what's what of home game streaming. From older options like Steam Link to the Parsecs and Moonlights of today, not to mention some of the recent high-quality, low-latency backend tech that's making it possible, there's a lot to unpack. Join us!
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Some useful links for this week's show:
Moonlight - https://moonlight-stream.org/
Steam Link - https://store.steampowered.com/steamlink/about/
Parsec - https://parsecgaming.com/
Raspberry Pi 3 - https://amzn.to/35xiL7y
Raspberry Pi 4 - https://amzn.to/2FfcDWN
URI vs. URL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#URLs_and_URNs
Brad: [00:00:00] What's the, uh, what's the old saying red sky at morning. Say that sailors take warning
Will: [00:00:04] Just don't ever go outside. Brad,
Brad: [00:00:07] red sky at night. Sailor's delight.
Will: [00:00:09] you still fucked.
Brad: [00:00:10] What does it mean? What if what's the old saying for red sky all the time? Oh my God. The world is ending.
Will: [00:00:17] Yeah. Um, I, I realized when that happened the other day, if you don't know what we're talking about in the Bay area and a lot of the West coast, the sky was blood red for most of the day on Tuesday.
Brad: [00:00:29] so I think that was Tuesday. So Oregon got that way worse than we did the red style. Like if you saw some of the photos and videos going around on Twitter, I mean, it looked like, do you mind, you know, you know what it looks like in breath of the wild, when like you take over like the moon, the blood moon and all the enemies respond and stuff, it looked like that, like, everything was just red.
Will: [00:00:47] so that's what it was like here all day on,
Brad: [00:00:50] That was Tuesday.
Will: [00:00:51] it was Tuesday.
Brad: [00:00:52] then Wednesday was the day that I got, I dunno, like what, eight, 10 miles South of here.
Will: [00:00:56] Yay. I'm eight or nine miles South.
Brad: [00:00:58] I don't know what it was for you, but, uh, I got up, so I woke up pretty early on Wednesday. Like 6:00 AM to get up. I'm in here drinking my coffee. It's usually dark seven am rolls around eight am rolls around nine, 10, still just as dark
Will: [00:01:15] So, our streetlights were on all day on Tuesday. Like all of them. Um, when I went out in the front yard, it was. Yeah, dusk. It was like late dusk. Pretty much at one o'clock in the afternoon.
Brad: [00:01:28] That's about right. I would say like there until, until about noon for like most of the morning, I would say it was like about the brightness of a full moon outside or just a little more.
Will: [00:01:38] Yeah. Like a really bright, full moon
Brad: [00:01:39] Yeah. Like it was pitch black in this house. Like I posted a little video on our discord of my living room and I couldn't see shit in my living room without any lights on.
Will: [00:01:48] We had to turn on all the lights and, um, my daughter was so freaked out by the whole thing that she moved her desk into her bedroom and shut the curtains and shut the door. So she was just like, I'm just, I just stayed up really late tonight, dad.
Brad: [00:02:00] Yeah. Well, why, why stop there, man, like build the, build the fall on the bed fort build the pillar fort and just get all the way under there.
Will: [00:02:07] I mean it's, uh, we, we, I couldn't sleep. I was so messed up on that night from like, just not knowing what time it was all day that I ended up going to sleep at like 5:00 AM. I think I just basically was laying there. I watched TV. I read, I watch more TV. I read, I played some games. I read, I read, I read and I finally fell asleep.
Um, It's weird the next day. It was also like, had it not been for the blood sky the day before or the day after would have been also very bad, but it was yellow.
Brad: [00:02:38] that was yesterday. That was, yeah, it was, it was brighter, but it was so yellow outside. It was just crazy. I don't think that is the human psyche is not built to see stuff like this.
Will: [00:02:49] Well, it's interesting. I read, I read a thing yesterday on, in ProPublica. Maybe I can't remember about like, why we're having this kind of wildfires. And basically the, the TLDR is for the last 40 years, we haven't been letting anything burn if we don't, if it's not, if it doesn't get out of, like, we don't do any controlled burns.
Yeah. Um, and, and. Uh, because people, because occasionally they get out of control and they burn stuff down and then somebody liable is what it seems like the TLDR is.
Brad: [00:03:18] This is way more mundane and annoying than I expected.
Will: [00:03:21] Yeah, no, I mean, uh, so, so the. There's obviously a climate change component too. Cause we're in the middle of 10 years of drought and, or we're at the end of 10 years of drought, which is, is taking a situation that was already bad and turning it into a tinderbox basically. But like the strategy for fixing this is that you burn small patches in large checkerboards so that there's some natural fire breaks and stuff and, and anyway, yeah, it's a mess,
Brad: [00:03:50] Is there anything that's not a mess right now?
Will: [00:03:52] you know, it's not a mess in home games, streaming.
Brad: [00:03:55] Oooh great. Let's talk about something truly important.
Will: [00:03:58] I kind of roll the music first, though.
Will: Welcome To Brad and Will made a tech pod I'm wIll,
Brad: I'm Brad
Will: How you doing there Brad?
Brad: [00:04:39] I'm okay. I'm doing okay. How are you?
Will: [00:04:42] I would describe myself as doing the best that I can.
Brad: [00:04:45] Yeah, that's a good way to put it. That's an optimistic, uplifting, positive spin.
Will: [00:04:51] Well, when you're inside my head, it doesn't feel that optimistic, but things are going great.
Brad: [00:04:55] fake it till you make it.
Will: [00:04:57] Yeah, something like, Hey, look, I, I am, I am very grateful right now. Um, it's, it's funny. We were talking about this in the house the other day, but like, this is the first time since my daughter was born, that everybody in the house is like into the same games.
Cause Gina is like a cache, an occasional gamer. Like she'll, she'll play. If there's a new burnout or a new need for speed. She might dip into that a little bit.
Brad: [00:05:20] Okay, Those are core games.
Will: [00:05:21] Yeah, but like this, this year, since the quarantine started with animal crossing and fall guys and Tony Hawk, there's a bunch of games that like, we're all playing.
My daughter included, which has been a trip like it's, it's really cool watching my kid, like be into a dead genre game. Like Tony Hawk. In the same way that I was for 10 years from like 1998 until 2007 or whatever. Right. Like it's, it's, it's good to know that, like she likes that even though it's not like the new hotness
Brad: [00:05:57] vindicates your, your old man memories. That sounds, that sounds like a nice way to maybe remove a little bit of the friction when you're stuck inside for months on end with the same people.
Will: [00:06:06] It definitely helps that we all have stuff to do both together and apart. And like having like a little meditative animal practice, animal crossing practice every day has been really good. Like we, like, what are you looking for? Oh, your blue roses finally grew. That's amazing. Congratulations. And like, you know,
Brad: [00:06:21]I can not wait for. I cannot wait for animal practice coming fall 2021.
Will: [00:06:26] God, what if you're like a doctor for the animal crossing animals? Well, so, okay. This is totally got off topic and it's not about game streaming at all, but on the animal crossing front, like my daughter has made a bunch of alt characters now that she's built houses for, that are like doctors and teachers and librarians.
And she's building like a little town full of people to service the needs of the animals
Brad: [00:06:46] Wait, do you mean alt player characters
Will: [00:06:48] She's making alt player characters. She was like, how do I make other accounts on my switch? And I was like, Oh, you do it like this. She's like, why do you want it? I'll show you later. And so she has like a teacher version of her and a librarian version of her and a doctor version of her.
Brad: [00:07:00] and that's how you very quickly found out how many accounts you can make on an Nintendo switch.
Will: [00:07:04] Well, we haven't reached that limit yet, but I'm sure it's going to anger me when it happens. Um, but yeah, it's, it's like, like having an open ended game like that with a kid who's cooped up all the time and has a lot of free time and can't leave the house at all right now, even to go in the backyard. You she's, she's impressing me with her ability to find new ways to play with something
Brad: [00:07:26] That's cool. That's a, that's, that's innovative. And that's also very community minded. When did, like, when you, when you first mentioned being a doctor, an animal crossing, it just made me envision what the Tom Nook HMO would be like
Will: [00:07:36] look, Tom Nook gives interest free loans to strangers.
Brad: [00:07:40] now I'm just angry. So we should move on.
Will: [00:07:45] so we were talking a couple of weeks ago about streaming games,
Brad: [00:07:49] Yes. But not like you think.
Will: [00:07:52] yeah. We're not talking about X cloud and we're not talking about, uh, uh, stadia. We're not talking about GeForce now.
Brad: [00:07:58] Yes.
Will: [00:08:00] I mean, we can, they all use the same basic technology, but, uh, if you have a steam machine, uh, PC running games or a PlayStation four or an Xbox one, you can play whatever you want kind of anywhere in the world in a lot of cases.
Brad: [00:08:14] Seems like it's getting to that point, but yeah, like talking, talking about the underlying tech is actually, I mean, granted this kind of what we do on this podcast, but like, that's kinda what I'm excited to talk about here because until the last, like, I don't know, 12 months or so I wanted nothing to do with playing games remotely.
Will: [00:08:31] So I've been using a steam link off and on to play like, single player games in the living room for probably since maybe six months after the steam link came out. I can't remember when they released that. I didn't look that up. I think that was 2015
Brad: [00:08:45] find that out it's Steam link box. Cause when you, when you search for steam link, now it just pulls up that, uh, uh, the app, was it like 2015, maybe?
Will: [00:08:56] seems right. It was around the time I left tested. And it's it. Wasn't a great experience at launch unless you were on wired and then some stuff had changed with the way the graphics drivers worked and it suddenly got pretty good.
Brad: [00:09:07] maybe, maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse here, but that's exactly what I want to know about is I want to know what changed because my early experiences with this stuff. And also just conceptually, like, I don't want artifacting, I don't want latency, you know, I just want to play a game process locally on the box, under my TV or next to my desk and like leave me alone. God dammit. I'm shaking my cane at you right now. You know what I mean? But like at some point, and we'll get into some of these, you know, like the parsecs and the moonlights and so forth, like a got really good,
Will: [00:09:37] Well, so, so the w so in the old days, the old, old days, when you would try to do this, it would just capture your game screen, like OBS does, if it captures the whole display, which is not particularly, um, latency friendly. So you would have a good, you know, you'd take a game where you already have a little bit of input latency, which we talked about a lot last week, and then you would add.
Actually, we didn't talk about that at all. Did we
Brad: [00:10:00] Well,
Will: [00:10:01] we talk about reflex
Brad: [00:10:02] yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. Yeah.
Will: [00:10:04] Um, but then you add more latency for capturing the frames as they're going through the frame buffer, and then you have video encoding latency and it basically didn't work. Even if you had hardware video encode, it was, it was, it was
Brad: [00:10:16] that's just too many steps, right?
Will: [00:10:18] Yeah. Well, it was for games like, um, like a Bethesda RPG is a great example because like, You can play a Bethesda RPG with 20, 50 milliseconds of input lag. And you're fine. But if you try to play spunky or dead cells or something that require, or, or like a ghost of Tsushima or something that requires some timing, dark souls, it's not going to work.
Um, and, and one of the things that happened is Nvidia when they started doing streaming with the shield devices, uh, using GeForce experiences as a server added this frame buffer capture. So it's NVF BC, and basically it captures the frame buffer the last place that the picture goes before it gets blasted out to the monitor and sends it, uh, without, without hitting open GL or Direct 3D without any of the inter without involving into the other APIs.
Um, And you can do it regardless of the driver of the application. So like, if you have say a windows render model, uh, the, you know, the Metro app style games, like Gears of War 5 was on the PC. It can grab that even if it's not even if it's using Vulcan or whatever
Brad: [00:11:26] Interesting. Okay. And that's, and that's just something that, uh, the application ties into.
Will: [00:11:31] So the App, yeah, it's it's it's application independent API independent. It only works in full screen mode. So cause for a while in the olden times, your best bet was to actually run your game in a window. If you wanted the steam link to work because of the way it was capturing that that was when it was either using IFR Nvidia IFR, which I don't know what IFR stands for, but it was, um, uh, basically it would, it, it could capture a single application in a window.
It required a little bit. It was a little fiddlier in terms of some apps just wouldn't work because of the way they were, they were rendering the frames. Um, and that was how that's, how steam does windowed mode, uh, uh, applications on the steam link and the steam, like a steam, uh, steam link apps now.
Um, but yeah, it's like, it's not. There's not, there's a lot of rocket science here in that. It is a very complicated, difficult thing that people are doing, but for somebody who wants to have a PC in their office and not hooked up to their TV, it's pretty easy to set up these days.
Brad: [00:12:37] So what's the best way to approach this. Like there's I guess, like we could start with the older, uh, solutions for this, but they're kind of profoundly obsolete at this point. I think
Will: [00:12:49] Um, I, well,
Brad: [00:12:50] like there is the original steam link box and then, you know, like the PS4 has got remote play, but the PS4 came out seven years ago.
You know what I mean?
Will: [00:12:58] But so the PS4 works because it has hardware encode it PS4 and Xbox one work because they have hardware encode for H264
Brad: [00:13:06] It's the same, that's the same hardware that they use to constantly record your gameplay. Right.
Will: [00:13:10] Exactly.
Brad: [00:13:11] In fact I think they, I think the PS4, at least maybe the Xbox as well, like straight up pops up a message. I think I want to say it, or maybe, maybe it's buried in there somewhere, but there is some messaging somewhere when you use remote play on PS4.
So I was like, Hey, game recording will be disabled while you're using remotely.
Will: [00:13:25] Yeah. And like, so reply, remote play. I know people who like stream and don't have a capture card, use PS4 or Xbox remote play. Uh, and, and just set those up. Basically, you download an app or if you're on a windows, 10 machine, you have the Xbox app built in and you have to connect them to the device and then you can just fire it up remotely.
And it, and it pops up in a little window. The game pops up in a little window on your, on your desktop
Brad: [00:13:50] and know it works.
Will: [00:13:51] yeah, it's fine
Brad: [00:13:51] it it's been useful for me to have that on the PS4 occasionally to do something I need to do while I'm in here working in the other room. But like there's enough. Artifacting there's enough latency even over a wired network that I wouldn't, I would never use it for something I truly cared about.
Will: [00:14:05] So it's funny. I use it. I've used it to do like screenshots and stuff like that when I needed to take some screenshots of VR games. Cause it's a way easier than the builtin tools. Um, it's, it's, it's more late. It adds more latency than plugging into a capture card and trying to play in a PC window, which you know, is.
Yeah, like a God of war. I had trouble playing Spiderman was fine because of the timing. Windows were pretty, pretty generous on that, but something that you need to do Perry's or something on like, you couldn't play Siqueiros on the, on the PS4 streaming,
Brad: [00:14:37] And like, I assume that there's really no more complicated than it's just seven year old hardware. And probably the, the, the, the stack, the software stack has probably not evolved that much in that time either. Right.
Will: [00:14:49] my guess would be that there's no equivalent of the frame buffer grab. For for this. Cause I mean, if you think about it, it's not something like for the other side of this, is that from a technology perspective, wifi, when these consoles came out, wasn't good enough to do this. And they're all 802.11N consoles, right?
I mean, I guess the pro and the X are AC maybe,
Brad: [00:15:10] I don't actually don't know about that. I'd be surprised if they are. I could, I mean, I could look it up if we really care, but
Will: [00:15:16] I mean, but the point is like,
Brad: [00:15:19] Oh, it's in, it's N, on the pro.
Will: [00:15:21] Yeah. So then the series X might be AC, but, but realistically, you're not going to have the performance on end to stream. So the other thing is you need to have faster internet and in most people's houses, that's going to be AC wireless, which is fine for 1080 P streaming.
If you want to go higher and there are some options now that will let you do 4k for if, when we tested Moonlight where you're doing 4k, or were you doing 1080P.
Brad: Uh 1080p.
Will: Okay. You can do 4k with Moonlight now, which is bonkers, right? The 4k up to 120 frames per second, I think.
Brad: Yeah that's pretty wild.
Will: Yeah. Um, it's, it's, uh, it's an interesting, like you, you can have a really compelling gaming experience where the, the hardware lives in your garage and like, it doesn't make noise or stuff in your house and you just have this remote gaming thing that lives some place else in your house.
Brad: [00:16:13] That sounds, that sounds kind of nice right up until you have to go plug a USB, stick into it for something.
Will: [00:16:19] I mean, look that I was going to say the downside of all of this is that at some point you're going to have to probably get up and walk into the room and mash some buttons because it it's, it's a pain in the ass. It is, it adds a fair amount of jank to your gaming experience, which a lot of people don't want.
Brad: [00:16:34] Yeah. So before we get into the modern solutions, can we talk about the original steam link? Just a little bit?
Will: [00:16:38] Yeah. It's a cool box. I still have to have them plugged in
Brad: [00:16:41] you have, okay. So like this is very self surfing. The main reason I want to bring it up is that I bought one for like 12 bucks a year or two ago, couple years ago, still sitting in the drawer and I keep.
Will: [00:16:53] your house is, like you have an HDMI cable.
Brad: [00:16:55] I do. Yeah. Like I don't even know I bought it cause it was $12. Not because I have a use case for it, but that's kind of why I bring it up like that. There's really, it doesn't seem like there's that much to do with an old steam link. Like there's not a, there's not a big Homebrew scene for it. Like, is it, is it, is it still usable for its original purpose or
Will: [00:17:12] Yeah.
Brad: [00:17:12] are you going to benefit from, I guess maybe that's the real question?
Like, are they able to update the client's software on it and. Will that allow you to benefit from like improvements to latency and software? Is the hardware itself old enough that it's kind of hamstrung in that way?
Will: [00:17:25] So they're continuing to update it. I get updates every once in a while for it. Um, it is limited by the hardware and that it does not have hardware support for H265, or if it does have hardware support for h.265, it doesn't, there's no Linux drivers for whatever the hardware is that. That that do that.
Um, but at 1080p 60, which is, I think where it caps, excuse me, where it caps out. Um, it's, it's really good at 1080P stuff. Like I play, I have, I have them hooked up in my living room and bedroom. I put Moonlight on it so I can do the, the, the GeForce streaming and get access to some other games that aren't necessarily on steam a little bit easier.
Um, I think it's fine. Like, I wouldn't. That said I definitely would not go like third party cause valves stop selling them. Like they've stopped selling them in favor of having apps that are built into the TVs are available on like Apple TV and stuff like that
Brad: [00:18:19] Yeah. Like you can get a steamer, so it's the same name, right? Isn't it. The branding is still steam link, even for the, for the new app. Like you get, you can, you can even get it for raspberry PI. Like they publish it for all kinds of stuff.
Will: [00:18:30] Yeah. So I was going to say the solution. If you want a box and not an app that's built into your set top box or your TV, if you don't want to do that, then the solution isn't to go to eBay and buy a steam link it's to go buy a raspberry PI three or four and use that
Brad: [00:18:44] Yeah, I think, I think I, I Googled earlier just out of curiosity and I think they go for more now than they did at launch, just cause they're scarce enough. And there's zero reason to spend that money.
Will: [00:18:53] No. I mean the boxes, it's a nice little box. It doesn't have any active cooling, so it's quiet. Um, but, but no, just get a raspberry pi and buy a nice case and use that instead. And you'll have more like the hardware in these newer raspberry pies is more capable anyway.
Brad: [00:19:08] Yes. By far.
Will: [00:19:10] yeah. So like when, when these things started, when like the remember the PlayStation TV, cause you could stream from a PS4 to that to
Brad: [00:19:17] Could you PlayStation TV? God, why am I blanking on what a PlayStation TV was? That was that. That was also the, yeah, that was also the thing that played Vita games on the TV. Yes. Now I remember
Will: [00:19:27] Well, video games that didn't require the back touch, I think was the limiter.
Brad: [00:19:30] Now I remember.
Will: [00:19:32] Yeah. So, uh, you can do, uh, PlayStation, TV, uh, another bad set top box that you shouldn't try to find and buy one at this point. Um, but, but the point was back when it started, you needed a wired ethernet, wired ethernet to wherever you wanted to work and with, and with AC kind of you don't anymore, like AC is pretty good.
Um, I, so I have one wired set up with a steam link box and an Apple TV in the living room. A one wireless in the bedroom. That's uh, just the, the steam link. And they're both fine. Like they're like the wireless is definitely not as good. You occasionally get a little bit of blocky artifacting if like something bad happens to the wifi, but for the most part, it works.
It works just fine.
Brad: [00:20:14] I continue to be so jealous of people in houses who don't have catastrophic wifi pollution
Will: [00:20:20] It is, uh, it is nice. The AC stuff handles the catastrophic wifi pollution better than any of the previous versions of wifi. Cause there are still a dozen, like I see a dozen APs for my house when I fire up my, my, my scanner thing.
Brad: only a dozen?
Will: Only a dozen, Yeah, I know. I know. Um, but yeah, so, so, but, but the solution, if you like the steam link.
Is probably like steam link is great for games that run on steam. It's hard to run, uh, whether you're using the box or the app, it's hard to run things from the Epic store. It's hard to run things that you buy from the Microsoft store that come with game pass. It's hard to run stuff from origin.
Brad: [00:21:01] Can you not, I could be totally off base here, but I feel like I had seen, cause you know, you can add custom games to steam. You can just say, Hey, like point know, point yourself with this executable. And now you're a steam game. You know what I mean? Like I thought I had seen people say, you could just add games like that to steam and then run them through steam.
Like that way
Will: [00:21:18] Sometimes you can
Brad: [00:21:18] Oh not always.
Will: [00:21:19] not always, so. It depends on what kind of DRM they require, you know, how you can make like a file shortcut in windows to launch a steam game by like calling a specific URI it's like steam colon. And then there's a long series of digits numbers. There isn't necessarily, yeah. An Epic equivalent for that.
And there definitely isn't a Microsoft equivalent for that. So if like, if the Epic store needs to be running in order to make the game work and you have to launch it through the Epic store for the DRM, that won't work. Um, but there is this thing called glow SC. That's like a little bit of a rapper. Uh, you can download, it's a tiny tool.
Basically. You pointed it at the thing that you want to run and you tell steam and it builds a container for it that steam will recongize.
Brad: [00:22:05] Oh interesting.
Will: [00:22:06] and that makes it work. And that even works for Microsoft store games. So game pass stuff works there to
Brad: [00:22:11] And then spelling on that is Glo S C
Will: [00:22:15] Glo S C uh, the, unfortunately. I've been using glossy for two years now. Probably there are a handful of settings in there and my process, like there's no rhyme or reason to which games need which settings to work. So you often find yourself in a, okay, I'm going to make a shortcut add it to steam does this one work , no? Okay. Kill that short cut. Let's change this setting and see if changing the setting makes it work. Does that work? Yeah. Okay. One more time. And then you get on like the third time.
Brad: [00:22:45] So it's so it's, so it's free software
Will: [00:22:47] It is free software and is it's doing something that the system is not designed to do.
Brad: [00:22:52] Yes. Um, sidebar, just because you mentioned, mentioned it a minute ago, what did we move from URL to URI? What does the I stand for? And are they the same thing I've been in all? I know what a URL, in fact, I know what they both are, but like,
Will: [00:23:07] URI is more general. A URL is only for HTTPs. I think it's indicator, but I'm not sure. Universal resource indicator, maybe
Brad: [00:23:17] Okay. I try to Googling that is way harder than you think.
Will: [00:23:21] resource identifier.
Brad: [00:23:23] resource. I was trying to have to get past all the university of Rhode Island stuff
Will: [00:23:26] I see a me too.
Brad: [00:23:27] Also every time I see URI, I just think of some kind of urinary tract infection or something. Uh,
Will: [00:23:33] Ah, so URI is a collective. Is, is the URL is the subset of a URI.
Brad: [00:23:40] Oh, there's also such a thing as URN that uniform resource name.
Will: The URN what
Brad: who's on first.
Will: [00:23:49] Interesting.
Brad: [00:23:50] The ISA is so ISBN is a form of urn or no, it can be no, I'm sorry. ISBN numbers can be encapsulated in nobody cares about this except me. Uh, okay. URL is a type of URI.
Will: [00:24:03] Brad, we have a, we have a patron level that we can get you to, that we'll do an episode just on URIs and URNs. if you back the pod.
Brad: [00:24:11] What level do I need about, okay, we'll talk about it later
Will: [00:24:13] We'll have to talk about it off line.
Brad: [00:24:13] I would, I would love to become a supporter of this podcast,
Will: [00:24:16] It's a great podcast. Everybody should.
Brad: [00:24:17] so I hear,
Will: [00:24:19] okay. So steam link, pretty good. If you buy all your stuff on steam, if you want to play other stuff, maybe look at some other options
Brad: [00:24:25] let's yeah, so that was my question. So is Moonlight the way to go? Is that where we should start?
Will: [00:24:31] So Moonlight is just a client for the GeForce game stream. Protocol, which is a private Nvidia thing. It only works if you have an Nvidia video card.
Brad: [00:24:40] I was gonna, I was going to say that immediately disqualifies AMD owners.
Will: [00:24:43] Yeah. So the that's the bad news. The good news is I think it's the best experience that I've had for in-home.
Brad: [00:24:50] mean, the big question is, is it, is it fully inclusive of steam? Like it'll run anything on steam,
Will: [00:24:55] You can open up steam big picture from insight. It loads that up as a default option
Brad: [00:24:59] Okay. So and works with just about anything else.
Will: [00:25:02] It, uh, you can also load up the desktop so that anything you can launch from the desktop, you can use. It Doesn't use the steam controller interface. Usually like it shows up to steam as an Xbox, the controller you have plugged into the steam link or, or your raspberry PI or whatever your PC, uh, shows up as an Xbox 360 controller, I think, no matter what, um, it works really well.
Brad: [00:25:27] Yeah. I'd so I like what? 45 minutes ago. It was the first time I ever tried it. I, you have any connects to your machine. We played some samurai gun. Uh, I played a little bit of,
Will: [00:25:37] my ass and samurai gun.
Brad: [00:25:39] I was the connecting player. I mean, I wasn't, I almost wasn't going to brag or anything,
Will: [00:25:43] No, it's fine.
Brad: [00:25:44] uh, we just, we played some of that.
I ran around and dead cells a little bit. And so I did not to get ahead of ourselves. I came in here at all, excited to talk about how good parsec is. And then, and then I tried Moonlight and it's a, it is at least as good. Like I was kind of shocked. I was like, Oh wow. Maybe just streaming games. Remotely is fucking shockingly.
Good. Now
Will: [00:26:06] I mean, I think that's like the, my experience with this stuff over the last couple of months, we haven't talked about steam remote play together, which is kind of streaming, but not, I mean, it is streaming, but it's a different use case. It's like streaming multiplayer games that are designed to be played on a couch together
Brad: [00:26:22] Yes. Well, so that's what parsec is. So those are actually directly analogous, I guess. We'll get to that.
Will: [00:26:28] let's talk about them in a minute then. Okay. So, so game stream is a thing that lives on top of, um, on top of, uh, uh, the GeForce experience. If you open up the GeForce experience and you go over to that tab, go into the settings and you go to, I think it's the shield tab. You can flip a switch switch that says, Hey, I want to stream games.
Uh, It knows what works really well by default, that's part of the Nvidia NVIDIA's marketing co-marketing program. Um, you can add anything you want, including the windows desktop. It automatically has a steam big picture mode shortcut. So like I was able to load up Tony Hawk one plus two, and after a little bit of fiddling to get the controller working.
It just, I can just play it on any TV in my house now, which is awesome. A samurai gun just worked. If you have mouse and keyboards hooked up to the end points, you can play stuff that uses a mouse and keyboard. I played some surgeon simulator the other day. Um, it, and it, like I said, it does work with like games like windows store, Microsoft store games that you can't find the executive will anywhere because it's
Brad: [00:27:33] sorry, I'm sorry. The, what
Will: [00:27:34] the program
Brad: [00:27:35] you did that on purpose. I'm not, I'm not going to take the bait
Will: [00:27:39] You already took the bait.
Brad: [00:27:41] I'm resinding it
Will: [00:27:42] This is the bait taken. Um, but, but like those games, like when you download gears of war 5 from the Microsoft store, because you've gained pass that it's just hidden something it's in some folder that you, as the user on your computer do not have to
Brad: [00:27:55] are not allowed to access on your own goddamn computer.
Will: [00:27:58] continues to offend the living shit out of me
Brad: [00:28:00] Yeah. I just gave up on it. I was like, you know what? Fine. Fuck it. You can have your protected system folder. I don't care. What's in there. Just let me play the game. Uh,
Will: [00:28:08] That's how they win
Brad: [00:28:09] UWP is weird. It's a weird little app basket.
It's a little bundle of things that you can't touch. So yeah.
Will: [00:28:17] Um, so, so one of the neat things about, um, okay, so a couple of things on all of these, you want to turn on NV FBC. If you have an Nvidia card, um,
Brad: [00:28:27] Wait. Oh, you have to enable that manually.
Will: [00:28:29] On steam you do on Moonlight and game, game stream. You do not
Brad: [00:28:32] Sorry, what was the acronym?
Will: [00:28:34] NV FBC,
Brad: [00:28:36] the front buffer capture.
Will: [00:28:38] frame, buffer capture
Brad: [00:28:38] Oh, you wrote front. You I'm sorry. You wrote your front cover capture
Will: [00:28:41] but it's both.
It means either one.
Brad: [00:28:43] It is. Okay.
Will: [00:28:44] Yeah.
Brad: [00:28:44] So that's a setting in steam. You have to, why would they not just put, seems like something they would just turn on at runtime.
Will: [00:28:50] I don't know if they can detect whether it's available on the cards without like comparing to a list of the hardware
Brad: [00:28:55] that's another question. Is this only on recent Geforces or is this on any that are still in use? Do you know?
Will: [00:29:01] it works on both of my machines. One has a 1080 and one has a 2080. So I don't know about prior to that, but it works on those two for sure. Um, and they didn't, I looked for documentation about this, but it's not like a spec sheet thing that anybody can that normal people care about. So, um, I would be interested to hear people have older cards where, where the cutoff is.
Um, The Moonlight is an open source project that uses the same protocol as the Nvidia shield, which is a series of hardware devices. They have tablets that I don't think they actually make the tablets anymore, but they have set top boxes that are really super capable. Like the it's like a super capable Apple TV, basically.
Um, The moonlight is, if you want to put it on a raspberry PI, there's a steam link version of the Moonlight client, which I've been using. You can put on your laptop, you can run on your phone, it's everywhere. So the initial pairing stuff for all of this is more or less the same. Basically. You say you want to connect to a server from the client.
It either gives you a number. It gives you a place to type in a number, and then you run it in and look up what the number is. You put the corresponding number in on one of the computers and you get it from the other one
Brad: [00:30:11] that is, that is something to know ahead of time, is that it does require a little bit of pre planning or forethought, like in a, in a, in a hypothetical world where like business travel happened and like, say,
Will: [00:30:23] before you leave the house
Brad: [00:30:23] right. Like you, if you happen to have your work laptop with you, and you're halfway across the country, you can't just install Moonlight and do it on a lark, you have to have paired that machine with your hosts.
Before you left town.
Will: [00:30:34] and in the case of Moonlight, you also have to open some ports. If you want to do it across the internet, uh, as a general rule, uh, they, they have a tool that kind of helps along with that process and helps, you know, what UPNP And trust
Brad: [00:30:45]Okay. Oh, well maybe we'll get to that. That might be an area where parsec does have a leg up on Moonlight then,
Will: [00:30:51] I think that is definitely the case
Brad: [00:30:52] because we have not had to do that so far.
Will: [00:30:56] So let's see you pair it. And the neat thing about Moonlight is all of the settings are on the client side. So like on steam in order to change bitrate and stuff like that, to do what your wifi can handle or what your net run network's capable of with parsec. I can, I mean, with Moonlight, I can lay in bed and change the settings and see if it works and then change the settings down a little bit more and then see if it works and change the settings down a little bit more and see if it
Brad: [00:31:17] Yeah, I was able to adjust the bid rate. I was quote unquote connected to your instance all time, but I just in between games, you know, I, I quit out of dead cells and then I went and boosted the bit rate by a factor of like three, the triple edge went and tripled the bit rate and then immediately launched another game and it just worked seamlessly.
It was nice
Will: [00:31:33] well, so, so in my experience, a bit rate in, in the house of like 30 megabits is like, I can't tell much of a difference above that at 1080P.
Brad: [00:31:42] That's probably fine. I just went to 150 because that was the highest of supported. And I wanted to see if,
Will: [00:31:46] It went to 150
Brad: [00:31:47] yeah, I boosted it all the way up there. I mean, granted, we both have gigabit up and down and you live like 10 miles away. So these are pretty ideal network conditions.
Will: [00:31:56] yeah, it's the only way we can do better than that. Between houses. If we ran an ethernet cable and you live next door
Brad: [00:32:01] Yes. Um, but, uh, Well, yeah, like you said, even, even at a fifth of that, it's extremely high quality.
Will: [00:32:13] Um, the there's, there's a lot of settings as always, but for the most part you can set it up it, like I said, it passes an Xbox controller, uh, passes, whatever you have as an Xbox controller to the client, to the host machine, and then you configure it to work and, and yeah. The challenge on Moonlight comes often with the interaction between the gate, the Nvidia game stream game pad capture, and steam hardware.
Like the steam controller support
Brad: [00:32:42] I forget why I, Oh, I know why I did it. I was taking screenshots in a game, so I set up a, and this is a feature that I'm not super familiar with, but I set up a custom profile for my Xbox controller in steam. I don't know how long that's been in there. Um, you know, it kind of like,
Will: [00:32:56] 5 years, it came out with the vive.
Brad: [00:32:58] really
Will: [00:32:59] Yeah, they didn't expose it for normal controllers for a couple years after that, but you could get to it.
Brad: [00:33:02] Okay. That would explain it. Um, yeah. You know, it's the thing that lets you kind of remap the, uh, Bunzl the controller at the steam level, lets you bind in fact like full on like keyboard shortcuts to different buttons stuff like that. Anyway, I have set up.
Will: [00:33:15] lets you use like a PS4 controller with steam that then shows up to the game as an Xbox 360 controller without using like DS for windows or something like that.
Brad: [00:33:21] Yes. A lot, a lot of cool stuff like that.
But, uh, I had, I had set a controller up to take screenshots with certain buttons. So that's why I have that old custom profile, loaded and word. The point is that that seemed to confuse Moonlight enough that it couldn't see my controller because that I that's the running theory of why it couldn't find my controller.
Will: [00:33:39] I think they fight over it. And, uh, you end up in a weird situation where, uh, where like for Marvel Avengers, for example, the other night I had to turn off steam controller support for that game in order to see. The Moonlight controller when I was playing the game. Uh, the other thing is both steam link and Moonlight will let you do let you like use the, the right stick on the controller and the right trigger as a mouse, uh, as a mouse analog, it is absolutely maddening.
It is one of the worst UI experiences I've ever had on all fronts. Uh, so if you are going to do this and it is too far to walk back and forth between the two computers, maybe consider getting a, a core, a wireless mouse and keyboard, like one of those Microsoft and Logitech, both make wireless keyboard slash trackpad things that are like 25 bucks
Brad: [00:34:31] You're talking just to, to do the minimum required input to make things go, not to actually play a game on. Yeah, I've got, I've got one of those.
Will: [00:34:38] yeah. It's, it's, it's purely for interacting with the computer in the living room, not for playin games
Brad: [00:34:41] Yeah. Yes. I think, uh, the K 400 is the Logitech. I've got. They may be on it. There's probably a, probably a newer model at this point. Mine is very old.
Will: [00:34:50] Yeah. It's it's I mean, it's, it's a useful thing to have any way for MISTERS
Brad: [00:34:54] on they're cheap.
Will: [00:34:55] things and they're yeah, like 25 bucks. Um, so that that's a Moonlight. Uh, I, before we jumped to the parsec, which is, I think a little bit of a different thing. Um, if you want to know how to make this stuff better, run a cable.
Is the first thing, like if you can run, if you can run a ethernet cable, you're going to have a better experience with wifi. I think no matter what, um, hardware acceleration on the host has to be on for this to be playable in my experience that, and ideally you do the GPU video acceleration, which basically gives you instant video encodes.
Um, but if you don't have that, then the CPU acceleration is pretty good on Intel. At least I haven't tried the AMD stuff.
Brad: [00:35:35] do you have any, not to digress, but I'm totally going to digress. You need any tips to people who can't like run cables through walls for running cables.
Will: [00:35:43] Power lines. Pretty good.
Brad: [00:35:45] Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm in physically running an ethernet. Cause I accept, I accept nothing but the best.
Will: [00:35:50] around the edges. Uh, so if you can put holes in the floor or the baseboard little tiny pinholes, you can get these cable. They're like cable tight tack downs
Brad: [00:36:00] Yeah. The little nail, the little nail things. Yeah.
Will: [00:36:03] Yeah. It's like a little plastic loop with a, um, that just holds the cable against the floor.
Comcast used to always put them when they would run a cable along a wall in your house. Um, there, you can get a box of a hundred of them at the hardware store for like five bucks and,
Brad: [00:36:18] are good.
Will: [00:36:19] that'll let you do what you
Brad: [00:36:20] Um, I,
Will: [00:36:21] can also get flat. Ethernet is the other option.
Brad: [00:36:24] I, yeah, I just ordered one of those for a completely different purpose, but I got a couple of flat ethernet cables on the way right now, actually.
Will: [00:36:31] I mean an important part of how ethernet, uh, uh, the way of the way cat five and cat six works has to do with the twists of the sub pairs inside the wires. So I don't, I assume they work. I haven't used one. I know that a lot of people who have like PR people use them to run like. Ethernet and HDMI up to their TV, that's mounted on the wall so that it's flush and you can just kind of put a little bit of paint and some stuff over it.
So it looks like a weird bulge in the wall rather than a cable going up there.
Brad: [00:36:59] You know what they said, the same thing about rounded IDE cables back in the day. Well, actually, technically they said the said, the opposite.
Will: [00:37:06] Yeah,
Brad: [00:37:07] was, that was going. The other,
Will: [00:37:08] don't use rounded IDE cables
Brad: [00:37:09] that was, that was well, no, but I mean, that was going the opposite direction. Those started out flat and became round.
And now you're what we're talking about is going from round the flat that's the opposite direction, but like,
Will: [00:37:17] you ever try to make a flat IDE cable round?
Brad: [00:37:20] Fuck No I'd saw people, people like took the, literally took the razorblade and like cut, cut,
Will: [00:37:25] down the stripes.
Brad: [00:37:25] insulation between. Fuck that, no.
Will: [00:37:27] We did that at maximum PC once. Just to see if we could do it. Five people made them and One of them worked
Brad: [00:37:34] Wow. That's thought , that's not a great success rate. I'm going to say
Will: [00:37:36] I mean they were free. They come with the motherboard,
Brad: [00:37:38] Uh, but I, uh, I did buy a good number of rounded ID cables and
Will: [00:37:43] they were bad.
Brad: [00:37:44] worked fine. I never had a problem.
Will: [00:37:46] Well, no, the problem with them was they. So if you were going to buy rounded ID cables, my stance was always that you should just get the ones that were only two ends. Cause the ones cause like an IDE cable, you could have three plugs on, but that middle plug was useless because all it did was Jack up the whole cable, make it really wide and unwieldy and probably you weren't able to get it where you wanted it to be anyway.
So you might as well just take that one out and buy a two end one and then you have a nice clean round cable.
Brad: [00:38:10] that's fair.
Will: [00:38:11] Yeah. Um, Uh, so yeah, uh, turn on the NV FBC if using steam, cause that stuff is dope. It's really good. Uh, and if you're, if everything you have in, on the video card and on the client supports two 65, h.265, you should, you should do that.
Cause you're gonna have better image quality with a different kind of artifact than you will with H.264 that you don't notice as much. Um, I think that's it. Uh, the Glo S E thing is important for playing non steam games on steam. And, uh, Oh, the other thing is on the game stream stuff with Nvidia, you can add unsupported games.
So if you go to that games tab, the S the shield tab in the settings page, you can go down to the bottom and hit the add button and add anything you want. Um, and, and that is very convenient as well. or like I said, just have the desktop and click on whatever, you know, type it in with your, with your $25 keyboard and mouse.
Brad: [00:39:11] Braver than I am.
Will: [00:39:12] What's up with parsec man. I'm curious on this. I haven't used it at all.
Brad: [00:39:15] so like I said, I came in here ready to, just to extol the virtues of this low latency, high video quality back in tech. But then again, like I just said, when we tried Moonlight earlier, it seems pretty much just as good. So it's more, it seems more of the case that just the technology has evolved to the point that it's quite good now.
Um, I guess the biggest difference with parsec is it's much more focused on enabling multiplayer. It's kinda, it's kind of what steam game stream does like mood. Well, let me, let me back up like philosophically Moonlight is correct me. If I'm wrong, it's more geared toward you playing your own games off of your hardware or somewhere else.
Right?
Will: [00:39:51] I think that is correct, yes.
Brad: [00:39:52] That's that's the biggest use case of Moonlight?
Will: [00:39:55] Uh, whether and somewhere else in that case can be in your house
Brad: [00:39:58] else in your house or on the road
Will: [00:40:00] out in the world? Yes.
Brad: [00:40:01] Um, parsecs intended use cases is more for multiplayer. It's more for allowing, you know, co-op of local games, remotely, that kind of thing.
Will: [00:40:12] So like, if you want to play getting over it and not getting over it, um, the men stacking game
Brad: [00:40:19] uh, not your friends. Yes. If you want to
Will: [00:40:22] Mt. Your friends.
Brad: [00:40:23] to remotely Mount your friends, You can do that. Um, I mean, I
Will: [00:40:28] I think that's a different episode,
Brad: [00:40:29] yes, for sure. I like the, I mean the best real world example is apparently the fighting game community is we're using, parsec quite a bit for remote tournaments right now, since they can't get together yet.
Like in fact that is probably the biggest endorsement you could have.
Will: [00:40:41] Holy shit. I didn't know that.
Brad: [00:40:43] the FGC deemed it latency appropriate for, you know, you know, these are not necessarily talking about Evo. Like, I'm not sure what the stakes are, but like if they're willing to use. This in competitive situations, like you can assume it's pretty good.
Will: [00:40:57] So it's like one person hosting and then both the players are connecting so that nobody has hosted vantage.
Brad: [00:41:02] That's a good question. I mean, in that case, wouldn't you want a third party to host?
Will: [00:41:08] That's what I'm saying. Have a third party host and yeah. Or is this for old games? Like street, like emulated street, fighter two and stuff like that.
Brad: [00:41:14] I don't know, I haven't, I haven't looked too deeply into it. I've just seen some people saying that the FTC types are using this for remote tournaments recently. But, um, so, so it is it's client software that you download or, or client and host software.
Um, well, I guess one of the bigger disadvantages over something like Moonlight is you have to make an account with them. Um, it's a very like discord, like signup process, or you get a username with a kind of a hash, like a number appended to it. So then you have a friends list. You have to add people to your friends list.
You are going through their central authentication to, um, do you use it like you
Will: [00:41:48] Yeah. Whereas Moonlight is completely decentralized and self hosted
Brad: [00:41:51] Moonlight is a full on opensource. You can utilize it, get hub repo link. It does that.
Will: [00:41:56] I mean, you do still need the Nvidia GeForce experienced stuff to use Moonlight.
Brad: [00:41:59] Yeah. Yeah. But what I mean is like, it is it's free and open in the way that opensource software tends to be, whereas parsec, which is a commercial product and you fall on have, uh, a paid like corporate option for parsec, uh, is, is much more, you know, it's it's account driven is what I'm saying. Like, you're gonna, you have to give them your email address or an email address to use it is what I'm getting at.
Um,
Will: [00:42:22] Hmm.
Brad: [00:42:23] Yeah. You know? Yes I did. Yeah. Anything that makes me want that makes me sign up, gives me some pause, but it's worked really well for us so far. Um, I assume that having, uh, having an account and having to go through their central backend, whatever it is is probably why we haven't had to worry about any port forwarding with this
Will: [00:42:38] That's that's that's my guess is that, that is what you were paying for
Brad: [00:42:42] Yeah.
Will: [00:42:42] not having to fool with ports.
Brad: [00:42:43] well, to be clear, the, the paid account is like a corporate thing. I'm not sure what the benefits are, but like as a, just a, an end user, you can use it for free
Will: [00:42:50] Oh, so it's probably probably what you're getting with the corporate account is like uptime and stuff like that,
Brad: [00:42:54] I could, I could look it up real fast.
Will: [00:42:58] what they're doing is they're using that to do game events and now they can take over the cliff ballroom and bring people in.
Brad: [00:43:01] Oh, I think, yeah. I think, yeah, I think you're right. That is totally, probably how they are monetizing this.
Will: [00:43:07] yeah, I saw, I saw, I saw a press release that I think that Ubi event a couple of when they did.
Um,
Brad: [00:43:13] I would believe that.
Will: [00:43:14] yeah.
Brad: [00:43:14] In fact, I know that actually I know some, some companies have been doing remote press events, remote preview stuff with parsec, specifically, I just looked it up. You can pay them 10 bucks a month. That was again in the end user to get stuff like, um, you know, like a better color space, you get four, four, four, if you're familiar with what that means.
instead of 4:2:2.
Will: [00:43:32] Is it better than 4:2:2? Yeah. Okay.
Brad: [00:43:34] Yeah. It's like,
Will: [00:43:34] there's two, there's two more in each of the last two columes
Brad: [00:43:36] It says there are better, better color, uh, pen and tablet support dual streaming. Screen switching. Some, some features like that if you want to pay, but that's not really what we're here to talk about. Um, but uh, they really talk a bit game about their tech. They have a linked it in the show notes here.
They have a page on their streaming tech. We don't take shortcuts. Uh, so they say,
Will: [00:44:00] They have a Falcon. It's gotta be fast.
Brad: [00:44:02] They say their core technology suite is built and cross-platform C um, They devise their own peer to peer networking protocol called bud or better user datagrams. I just, I, I appreciate that they put this information out there.
Will: [00:44:15] Wait,
Brad: [00:44:16] I'm not here. I'm not here to writing, to sing their praises so much as I just like when a company shows you what's behind the curtain
Will: [00:44:21] I'm disappointed. I thought this product was named after the TI994 classic. Parsec not, we can make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs
Brad: [00:44:29] let's, let's just, let's not
Will: [00:44:31] No, I'm just sad.
Brad: [00:44:32] to keep nerd references to a minimum on this podcast, if possible. We make our own nerd references around here. Thank
Will: [00:44:38] TI994A parsec is a fantastic game Brad.
Brad: [00:44:41] That's what I thought, you know, that's a good reference. I'll, I'll give you that, you know, a good references when you have like a, like a, maybe 50% success rate of somebody getting it or not,
Will: [00:44:49] the Dennis Miller ratio.
Brad: [00:44:50] to, you need to make it mysterious enough that some people haven't heard of it. And they're like, Oh man, he's in the know what is that?
I gotta go look that up. I am not cool for not knowing what that game is anyway. Um, yeah, I, I pulled this up cause they quote in here that they have a, what they call a 97% Nat traversal success rate. So that, so that must be, I assume that's why you're not having to fiddle with port forwarding and stuff like that to get this to work.
Uh, it's just, uh, it's breaching peoples nats without assistance.
Will: [00:45:21] Well my router is the net Buster right now because it doesn't support UPNP and it doesn't support loop back. So like there's a ton of stuff that just doesn't work. Right.
Brad: [00:45:29] Sounds like
Will: [00:45:30] Because AT&T blows
Brad: [00:45:30] uh, sounds like, sounds like maybe you need to bring a fancy router in your life.
Will: [00:45:36] Mmm
Brad: [00:45:38] I remember a time, I'm not going to name any names. I remember someone denigrating the fancy router, on the discord.
Will: [00:45:47] I just didn't want, it was a Patrion post. I just didn't want to have, I don't need more complexity in my life. I need less complexity in my life.
Brad: [00:45:54] the shitty routers come for us all. Eventually
Will: [00:45:58] Fucking shitty router
Brad: [00:45:58] Did you try to do you try to do enough cool stuff with your internet connection sooner or later, your shitty router is going to get in the way, and then it's time for the fancy router
Will: [00:46:06] I mean, fair fair. So
Brad: [00:46:10] Um, so they they've,
Will: [00:46:12] Next month, me building my PFsense machine. Um,
Brad: [00:46:15] I'm all for it. They, they mentioned some latency tests they did on here. I mean, this is granted. This is on a LAN. But they quoted a seven millisecond, extra latency situation with this over land, which was like, basically nothing. Granted, I don't know what that would be over, you know, even between me and you.
I'm sure it will be a little, like a handful of more milliseconds,
Will: [00:46:35] I mean we're in different ISP, so we have to go out to a backbone probably someplace. I w I wish we could have seen, um, what the latency would the end to end latency was when you were on the Moonlight connection here.
Brad: [00:46:44] Yeah, well, we would have had to set some kind of tests, but whatever I've used this real world, like I've played games with Vinny in New Jersey from California. Uh, I've played games with other people in the Bay area here. Like we, so we've been using this for quick looks. That's the big one for us is not just a play multiplayer, but you know, you just need to let the other person see what you're doing to talk about it.
Right. And this has, this has been damn near real time. As far as that stuff goes. Like, I don't think people can tell the difference now. Um,
Will: [00:47:12] I remember when we tried experimenting with that stuff in like 2010 when we were like, let's just do a, I feel like maybe Vinnie and I did a, did a, let's see if we can do this remotely test. And it didn't work like there was no, there was the, you were five seconds behind or something. It was, it was ridiculous.
Brad: [00:47:28] That stuff, uh, pretty bad. Um, but yeah, like I, uh, the battle toads quick look, we did, I did with Jason was posting that on his PC and I played it. Second player and like video quality and latency. I could barely tell the difference from a local game.
Will: [00:47:43] what's the client situation? Like what is it available for everything?
Brad: [00:47:47] uh, so that's kind of a bummer. Uh, the client is available for windows, Mac, and Linux, but you can only host from a windows machine as of right now
Will: [00:47:55] I mean, that makes sense, given what you're going to be playing.
Brad: [00:47:57] for the most part.
Yeah. Uh, I mean, I did want a host from MacBook at one point and was not able to, and that really sucked, but I, we, we have weird use cases for this stuff.
Will: [00:48:06] So I have a weird question. Is there anybody that's built something that would let me use one of these streaming technologies to play games on. For example, a FPGA based hardware, emulation platform with people that are not sitting in the house with me.
Brad: [00:48:24] I don't think that exists as of yet, but it's probably possible there may have, in fact, been people on our discord in the last couple of days, speculating about building exactly that.
Will: [00:48:35] I mean, all you would need to do is have a controller set up like a micro controller as a controller emulator and, and pass the inputs, right? Like it's pretty straight forward.
Brad: [00:48:47] you even need that. Could you do that over a network? I mean, obviously you'd have to build that in to the mister.
Will: [00:48:53] I don't know, I kind of just went, cross-eyed thinking about this, cause it's a little weird,
Brad: [00:48:58] There were a couple of, there were totally a couple of people in the mr. Channel the other day, talking about how much access to the Linix subsystem on the mister. Do you get and wether maybe they could maybe think about implementing something like that. Uh,
Will: [00:49:08] I will go dig into that.
Brad: [00:49:09] yes. Uh, but, um, anyway.
Will: [00:49:12] This is an intro. Like it's an interesting thing. It's it's this is one of those examples of a technology that came out and everybody tried it. I was like, Oh, this kind of sucks. And then over the last five years, it's gotten quietly. Really good.
Brad: [00:49:22] like don't get me wrong. I still want a new GeForce. I still want to play games. Locally in my house with hardware sitting by my feet
Will: [00:49:30] going to all X cloud and stadia next gen Brad.
Brad: [00:49:32] No, but when you need
Will: [00:49:34] guy Chi.
Brad: [00:49:35] when, when you're in situations like we're in where we need to record videos of games and get people looking at the games in high quality under and close to real time, like it's gotten shockingly effective for that.
Uh,
Will: [00:49:46] Look think about all the money your PC is wasting in electricity, playing these games. You can move your PC back into the CBS office, where it has a fatty internet pipe,
Brad: [00:49:56] Oh,
Will: [00:49:56] hook it up in there and let, let the man eat your power bill.
Brad: [00:50:01] That's right, I don't have to, I don't pay the power bill in the office.
Will: [00:50:06] No, that's free money right that
Brad: [00:50:08] That's a good point. I have to think about that. Um, I just a couple more things I was gonna say about, uh, parsec the, the front end UI I've found has left a lot to be desired in a lot of ways. Um,
Will: [00:50:18] How did it compare to the Moonlight front end ?
Brad: [00:50:19] Oh, well, so that's another situation where Moonlight definitely looks and feels like opensource software.
Like it's fine, but it's a little klutzy, I would say
Will: [00:50:29] I would. It does not have the attention to UI and UX that a commercial product typically does.
Brad: [00:50:36] To be fair, fairly the look and feel of the parsec of that client is totally fine. What I'm talking about is like idiosyncrasies like this. So the capture happens at either the app or the monitor level. So you can either say only capture the apps I tell you to or capture everything on the screen.
Um, the frustration with the app capture is if you tab out of the app, you tell it to capture it. We'll just go to a generic, like the host is doing something else screen. So that's very problematic. For example, if I want to like. Capture my El Gato capture window, and then tap into OBS to start a recording or whatever.
Then my client viewers lose my feed, which sucks ass. Um, so you can tell it, you can say just like, Hey, just stream this entire desktop. But then of course you're sending your whole desktop and all the problems that that entails, um, when it breaks out the monitors and the monitor list, by at least in my case, they all have the exact same name. They're all. They'll, they'll just say generic P and P monitor. So I can't tell which monitor I'm sending people
Will: [00:51:31] And does it tell you which one's one it like, does it pick the windows number
Brad: [00:51:33] No, every time we do this, I have to ask whoever's joining me, like, okay, which monitor are you seeing? And most of the time it's the wrong one. So I have to switch it.
Will: [00:51:40] Video game or hardcore pornography?
Brad: [00:51:42] Right, it's that situation basically. It's, it's, there's a bunch of little, a few little things like that that are pretty frustrating about it. Oh yeah. That's, that's one of the things I parsec like it has a web client, which I assume you, I assume you still need a login. Uh, so I'm sure you still have to make an account to use it, but, uh, it's, it's web RTPC based.
It says it only works in Chrome. What?
Will: [00:52:01] Well, what if the web client just worked like a, remember that, that chat roulette thing where you would just log into web pages, you get connected to some random person.
Brad: [00:52:08] I miss chatter roulette.
Will: [00:52:09] What, if you could just parsec? I can do a random person's computer and it's like,
Brad: [00:52:13] That's pretty. That would be pretty good.
Will: [00:52:14] no, it's, that would be a disaster, but it would be wonderful,
Brad: [00:52:18] let people opt into it, you know, so they know what they're getting into chatroulette.com still exists. Apparently. I don't think I should click this button to start it though.
Will: [00:52:28] Chatroulette was amazing until the penis to normal, funny things. Ratio was really high.
Brad: [00:52:33] that's a shame.
Will: [00:52:34] I did get one, like people doing a skit, like they were doing a performance of bad relationship, uh, for me while I was watching them or maybe they just had a bad really. Anyway,
Brad: [00:52:45] Chatroulette is a very whiskey media basement thing for me. That was definitely that era. Like I remember, I think there wasn't there, there was one night up upstairs in the glass, the fishbowl conference room. Everybody was like getting drunk and screwing around on chat roulette.
Will: [00:52:57] We were just dragging people on chat roulette for hours.
Brad: [00:53:00] Uh, my favorite one was, did you ever see the, the piano improv guy?
Will: [00:53:03] That guy was great.
Brad: [00:53:04] Yeah.
Will: [00:53:04] You mean Ben folds,
Brad: [00:53:07] This guy was this guy who was the better Ben folds.
Will: [00:53:10] Ben folds used to do that to
Brad: [00:53:12] he realized the real Ben did really.
Will: [00:53:14] my understanding. Yeah. I met the chat roulette improv guy at XOXO one year.
Brad: [00:53:18] no shit.
Will: [00:53:18] Yeah. They had him come out and, and talk.
Brad: [00:53:21] Wow. That's cool. That was a, that was a, that was a fun. That was a fun era of internet before everything went to shit.
Will: [00:53:26] Yeah. The internet used to be really good. Uh, so
Brad: [00:53:29] Yeah. There's yeah, there's a web client for parsec.
If, uh, if you just want to get people on and they're not in a position to install the client software or whatever, that's pretty convenient too, but,
Will: [00:53:37] does it, does it add extra layer? Like
Brad: [00:53:39] I don't know, probably not much web RTC is, is extremely low latency itself from my understanding,
Will: [00:53:46] and it seems like it's only Chrome.
Brad: [00:53:48] Yes, it is Chrome only for that, that browser, but we've all been using the installed client and it's worked fine,
Will: [00:53:53] That seems, yeah, that seems like the right choice
Brad: [00:53:55] it does, it does install a system service full disclosure, but what doesn't these days,
Will: [00:54:02] look, I.
Brad: [00:54:04] so does iTunes for that matter, like
Will: [00:54:06] number of systems services I have installed because I have Adobe and Backblaze and BlueJeans and zoom and Microsoft teams touch my computer at some point. So now I'm infested with that nonsense.
Brad: [00:54:19] Wait, you said you uninstalled install it.
Will: [00:54:22] I did,
Brad: [00:54:23] Are you saying there's residue,
Will: [00:54:25] I, I assume so. I have not found anything. I just have that, that software made me feel dirty in a that software hasn't in a really long time.
Brad: [00:54:30] I really, really did not have a good first experience with Microsoft teams.
Will: [00:54:35] That's what everybody's first experience with Microsoft teams is like
Brad: [00:54:38] Yeah. Anyway. Um,
Will: [00:54:41] I think that's it on our list
Brad: [00:54:42] kind of, that's the big stuff, I think. Have you, do you have any experience with rain way at all? That's another one that does this same stuff.
Will: [00:54:49] no,
Brad: [00:54:50] Have you not heard of it?
Will: [00:54:52] no. I'd never heard of it before
Brad: [00:54:52] I, I I've. I've just,
Will: [00:54:54] I think you told me about it the other day and I meant to look it up and then I didn't.
Brad: [00:54:57] I'm aware of it. I've never used it, but I just typed it into Google and rain wave versus parsec is the first like auto result that comes up.
So you can safely assume it's pretty similar to that. Um, the one, the one claim to fame, the parsec, I mean, the rainway has that I've noticed is they have seemed to have a habit of trying to push their app into places where it's not gonna fly, which is to say that they tried to put a rainway client on the Nintendo switch.
Will: [00:55:22] Oh, how'd that go for them
Brad: [00:55:22] And then Nintendo was like, nah, that's not going to happen. Actually,
Will: [00:55:29] a Moonlight client on the switch would be so good.
Brad: [00:55:31] I'm trying to, I'm trying to remember what happened. Exactly. I don't know if they like fully push it into the store or what was going on, but they were like touting. They were very much touting it as like play your PC games on your switch, which of course that would do gangbusters.
Right. But, uh,
Will: [00:55:47] That would be amazing.
Brad: [00:55:48] I don't remember what happened there. They were, or maybe they're just advertising that they were gonna put it on the switch and then Nintendo were like, no, you're not. There's something, something along those lines.
Will: [00:55:56] So apparently there's a Moonlight switch port. If you have a homebrew
Brad: [00:56:01] hacked hack switch. Yeah,
Will: [00:56:03] Um, I, I can remember in the old days of iOS, when people would release like a file. Like a file browser that also had Mame embedded in it. So it could play all the maim ROMs on your, yeah. Those were good times sneak one in there.
Get it past the man.
Brad: [00:56:21] Those good times. Couldn't last forever.
Will: [00:56:23] Um, so yeah, I guess that's it. If you have questions about this stuff, please send them into a tech pod@content.town.
Brad: [00:56:30] Yeah. I mean,
Will: [00:56:31] a lot. It's pretty cool. I feel like if I had a TV in a basement someplace, it would be really useful.
Brad: [00:56:36] totally. I mean, we're in a world. Weird. We are in a weird world right now where like the stuff is largely hypothetical. Cause nobody's going anywhere. Like they're sitting right by their PCs and consoles all day
Will: [00:56:48] I, I move on to tell you that Marvel Avengers game is a perfect, I just want to play something for like 30 minutes and wind down for a little bit at the end of the day
Brad: [00:56:55] Yeah. If yeah,
Will: [00:56:56] go smash stuff and it's fun.
Brad: [00:56:58] if you play everything on the PC, there is definitely a use case here to just like a flop in your living room and play it that way. Um, I the last thing I was going to ask just before we get outta here, like, does any of this stuff tie into the X clouds and Stadia's of the world in your mind in any real way?
Like I assume they're using pretty similar technology.
Will: [00:57:14] my assumption is that the FBC stuff came about because of the GeForce now a work that was done. I don't know what hardware, I mean, I know that the xCloud stuff is running on actual XBox hardware. I don't know what stadia is. I can't remember what stadia is running on. I can't remember for running on Nvidia or ATI
Brad: [00:57:33] Uh, I believe it's AMD for their graphics
Will: [00:57:35] Yeah, I thought so, too. Um, so I mean, I think all of it works together. This is one of those weird situations. It's like, it's like wireless VR hardware. Like the reason we didn't have wireless VR PC headsets at launch was that no one had ever made no, there would never been a need for a low latency. H.264 encoder.
Right. And then once there was a need for that, some people figured it out and it's in all, everything two years later. But like getting from a to B took time,
Brad: [00:58:05] is that really the case here is that we finally just hit the tipping point where the tech got good.
Will: [00:58:09] I think, I think probably, yeah. I mean like, you know, brain brains plus problem equals lesser problems. So
Brad: [00:58:16] Hum funny how it turns out like that. Uh, last question, uh, real quick. Um, the new console is being AMD based. Do you expect that there is similar tech to this kind of
Will: [00:58:27] I would be shocked
Brad: [00:58:28] direct, direct frame, buffer stuff that Nvidia is doing?
Like they've probably got some equivalent in those boxes, right?
Will: [00:58:33] I would be shocked. Like the only thing I would expect, the only console I'd expect to not have anything like this is the next switch. Right. Like their Nintendo doesn't care about this. They have a portable, portable hardware. So you don't need to take the, you don't need to be able to stream the games. Um, I I'm, it's funny.
I would love a Moonlight, a port or a parsec or Moonlight or something that lets me play games on the switch is incredibly compelling. Like just shockingly.
Brad: [00:59:02] I get it. I get it.
Will: [00:59:03] I don't think Nintendo is going to go for it though.
Brad: [00:59:06] Probably not. Uh,
Will: [00:59:09] Yes. If you have questions that have been as always a thank you to all of our patrons, for supporting the show,
the, I'm trying to think what was on the T what was on the discord this week? I've been really busy and haven't been dipping in that much
Brad: [00:59:25] I too.
Will: [00:59:27] There was a lot of people talking about the blood sky and sharing photos, and like, we had a good conversation today about how to actually take the photos. Cause it turns out.
Most of my favorite things about this is the phone. Auto-corrects
Brad: [00:59:42] Yeah. It was impossible to get an accurate photo that really truly represented the horror of the situation because the phone brightens and de saturates everything, and it just kind of made it look like about half as terrible as it actually was.
Will: [00:59:56] This is the problem with computational photography, right? Um, the, the a Haylight app, if you're on iOS, I don't know what the, what the Android equivalent, uh, lets you do manual exposure stuff, which, which then fixed the problem. Uh, it was just how I was able to take my red sky pictures the other day
Brad: [01:00:12] Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting on the discord watching the spread because since this is the second time it's happened in the Bay area in the last six weeks
Will: [01:00:20] But we didn't have the red sky like this before
Brad: [01:00:20] No, no, no, no, no, but I mean, but I mean just the, the confluence of wildfires and heat wave. Situation. This is the second time we've had that in the last, like six weeks,
Will: [01:00:29] I don't think we're gonna have heat wave this weekend. It's supposed to be cool still.
Brad: [01:00:31] God, I hope not.
But, but all I'm getting at is that like, we went through this like six weeks ago and now people in Oregon, people in Southern California, people in Washington, like I think, uh, Nevada's got fires now, right? Like it's kind of like more and more and more of the Westren States is now in the same boat.
Will: [01:00:49] It's bad. But, you know, what's great is our patrons, especially our executive producer teir patrons, Jacob chapel, Andrew Cotton, and David Allen. We appreciate you guys. And everybody else who's supporting the pod
Brad: [01:01:03] Yes. Thank you so much. I got to get reading all, all thousand, all thousand plus of you. I fished out my copy. It was at the bottom of a large stack of books.
Will: [01:01:11] okay. We were, we are at a more than a thousand backers now. Um, we appreciate you guys so much.
Brad: [01:01:17] they have, they have high expectations that I'm going to read this book. So
Will: [01:01:20] You have to read the book.
Brad: [01:01:21] on the nightstand. It's on the nightstand.
Ready to go.
Will: [01:01:24] Uh I'm I'm in the sixth chapter now, so yeah, it goes fast. It's really good. You're good. I think you're going to love it or you're going to really hate it one way or the other
Brad: [01:01:32] Oh, it seems hard to believe, but who knows? Stranger things have happened, I guess.
Will: [01:01:37] I mean, we could have done dune. That was the other option
Brad: [01:01:40] I don't know. I got nothing against Dune, but that sounds like a commitment.
Will: [01:01:44] dunes. One of the Seminole science fiction pieces of the 20th century
Brad: [01:01:47] I know that. Yeah.
Will: [01:01:49] Yeah, it's very good
Brad: [01:01:50] It's more, it's just more that I know.
There's a lot of it, but I know also I also, I know that after Frank Herbert died, it kind of went off the rails is my understanding.
Will: [01:01:57] No No,. After the first book, it goes off the rails
Brad: [01:01:59] Oh really? Even before he did
Will: [01:02:01] Each of the books is worse than the ones that come before.
Brad: [01:02:03] Okay Enough sad.
Will: [01:02:04] Yeah, avoid like read the first one and be like, that is an amazing book. And then whatever you do, don't pick up any of the other dune books. That's my advice. As somebody who's read way too many dune books, um, I guess next week, I don't know what we're doing.
We don't know exactly what we're going to do next week. So, uh, we will, uh, we'll, you'll find out with us next next
Brad: [01:02:23] Yeah,
Will: [01:02:23] for listening, everybody
Brad: [01:02:25] thank you so much.
Will: [01:02:26] have a good week. See you soon Brad.