So, I recently got into the Steam In Home Streaming beta.
For those not in the know this lets you stream games from one PC to another. This is working great from my gaming PC in the Office to the media center pc in the living room. Dolphin works great and Controls great with some minor quirks see below!
Steam limits the FPS of applications based on your network speed. If you have a wired connection you should be fine! Unfortunately my network is junk (Wireless G) and Dolphin gets throttled to 15 FPS. Frame skipping resolves this issue and makes games playable! This would be a fine solution however I can not find a way to save my frame skipping setting is there anyway to do this?
This opens a bunch a bunch of new doors for Dolphin as it allows people to play it on their TV with out the need of a powerful laptop or moving their gaming computer to the living room.
Has one else tried this yet?
I'm very exited to be able to try this awesome feature and I'm glad someone though about using it with Dolphin !
What is your configuration (video card, cpu, ram) on both computer ?
Are you using a Steam Machine ?
Steam OS ? or two computers with steam installed ?
Do dolphin runs correctly on your main computer ?
Do anyone else was able to try this ?
Steam In-Home Streaming worked great for me with Dolphin.
With In-Home Streaming settings at desktop resolution of 1080p, limited to 30fps (never renders faster than that anyway) and unlimited bandwidth, I was able to stream Twilight Princess with no latency problems. Was playing the gamecube version, and using an xbox 360 controller. I had used the controller with dolphin on my desktop before, and it picked it up right away and worked flawlessly through the stream.
The hardware configuration
ServerPC:
Windows 7 x64
Intel I7 975
nvidia 680
16gb ram
ClientPC:
Old Alienware laptop
SteamOS
Some Intel dualcore CPU
nvidia 260m
HDMI out to 1080p samsung TV
In order to get SteamOS to work with a TV on HDMI from a laptop (no support for extra displays yet) you have to get it to let you log into a GNOME desktop session as the steam user account.
The only part that caught me up a bit was adding the game to steam, which explained in a handy thread here:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-with-steam?highlight=steam
I also found that going to Options > Configure > Interface and unchecking 'Confirm on Stop' stops the emulator from asking for confirmation to exit, which you can't give through the stream. Steam streaming does not like pop-ups.
I checked 'Render to main window' under Graphics > General, but I'm not sure if it worked without it checked. From experimenting with other games, I found it helps to have only one window if possible.
Once its going its works great, as the OP said. I am going to try a Wii game soon, but I expect it will be difficult to get steam to understand that the Wiimote is a controller, so my hopes are not high. I will post again with my findings.
Would love to hear stories of other people's successes and failures with In-Home Streaming.
If you're only using it so you can play the games on your TV you might as well just buy a wii for <$50.
And enjoy the wonderful* 480p graphics the Wii outputs.
*Disclaimer: They aren't wonderful. At all.
VS the max 30fps of Steam's streaming (if your PC can manage it in the first place) and the H264 compression? I know which I'd prefer.
Steam can stream up to 60FPS at the moment and the compression is not that bad if your router can handle it.
I've streamed several PC games to my laptop at 1080p at 60FPS and they looked great. Dolphin and PCSX2 worked great too, but I have to do more testing with those.
The compression artifacts aren't really the issue (although I imagine they would be significant in 1080p). It's the computing power required to encode the 1080p@60fps low latency H264 stream while simultaneously running Dolphin in 1080p@60fps that makes it unfeasible unless you've got some sort of octo-core setup.
Both NVIDIA and AMD have hardware h.264 encoders though. NVIDIA's works at 1080p 60fps from what I can tell.
But Valve/Steam are using x264 (last I heard).