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My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

161–170 of 220 posts

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#161
post #39

If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency. I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can…

Steam Remote Play sadly breaks down if anything involving Admin comes up. Task manager, admin prompt, etc. Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin. Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients. So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with…

DualSense just got wireless rumble support Linux. I think that was the last missing feature!

Audio jack support has been in since 6.18 last November. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-DualSense-Audio-Handling

Come to the penguin side: we have the best drivers.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My TV was cheap so I didn't expect much. Steam link really struggles on it - thankfully I still have the old Steam Link hardware and it works alright. Locked to 1080p though. Refused to spend more on a TV because I feel you don't get much more processing power for an increase in price. All smart TVs I've interacted with in the last 5 years have been much slower than I would consider acceptable.

> Refused to spend more on a TV... While one can always try to see if their "Smart TV" can actually run a streaming client app like Moonlight with adequate performance, it's so hit-and-miss I just assume I'll have to plug in a ~$50 Android TV streaming stick via an HDMI input. I've used the 'Google Chromecast with Google TV' and 'Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen' and was able to sideload the open source Moonlight clie…

Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device.

Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...

Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#164
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Refused to spend more on a TV... While one can always try to see if their "Smart TV" can actually run a streaming client app like Moonlight with adequate performance, it's so hit-and-miss I just assume I'll have to plug in a ~$50 Android TV streaming stick via an HDMI input. I've used the 'Google Chromecast with Google TV' and 'Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen' and was able to sideload the open source Moonlight clie…

Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device. Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it fr…

> a multiview feature...

I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1M unit installed base.

The android streaming device market pretty much died when it became a race to zero margin. Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#165
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device. Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it fr…

> a multiview feature... I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1…

> I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats!

We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!

> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.

Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.

It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#166

I use Sunshine streaming from my home office gaming PC (4070Ti Super) via 1Gbps Ethernet to a "Google Chromecast with Google TV" streaming dongle running the Moonlight client in our dedicated home theater room. The streaming dongle is powered via a USB-C hub that has an Ethernet port and the HDMI output is plugged into a Denon AVR as an input source. The AVR outputs to a ceiling mounted laser projector with 150" scre…

What projector are you using if you don’t mind me asking? Been in the market for one.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train your brain to not "need" it. Brains are malleable whether someone diagnosed and labeled them or not. Concentrate on something else during those cut scenes, read a book, study the clock or thermometer or cat or leaves on the trees. Imagine a scenario where the power fails and you can't play games. Anything which doesn't enslave you to technology.

"Just think your way out of ADD" is a take, for sure.

Better than medication. Better than giving up and giving in. Better than learned helplessness. Better than being a slave to technology.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#168
post #2

50ft fibre optic HDMI cable, for those of you throwing an exception based on time domain reflection, and line level settling periods.

Right, yes, of course... the, um... domain reflections and... line settling levels. It's like you read my mind, thanks for addressing those.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#169
post #160
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just disable UAC. Yada yada bad practice yeah I know. I'm sick of constant slight annoyance due to hypothetical threat. If I get pwned I get pwned; hasn't happened yet lol

that you know of

”If a tree falls in a forest”, U=U, etc. This is just FUD otherwise.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#170
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.

Today I had to disable dual band WiFi on my windows gaming machine because PoE2 has this bug when a group of mobs surround you, network latency suddenly spikes, but only if the network card works on dual band... Sigh. I assume many issues like that will still exist on Steam Machine, as it's kind of unrelated to what's running the buggy software.

That issue cannot be a bug in the game, because the operating system should not allow a game to (by any means) produce that type of behaviour. So it's a bug in your OS, potentially the network card driver.

There are fewer of those on Linux but they still exist.

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