Live data from Hacker News

Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

github.com

11–20 of 162 posts

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#11
post #5

I don't remember whether it was this or "sunshine", but game streaming from your own PC hasn't been the same since it was simply "turn on the Nvidia feature". It was way too difficult to figure out how to make it work the last time I tried and I gave up and haven't tried again since. For all the good they do otherwise, FOSS devs just never seem to get usability right.

I hope you do try again! It's actually become an incredibly wonderful experience ever since the "turn on the Nvidia (proprietary!) feature" days. Nvidia's implementation as far as the software experience was convenient but also bad in a lot of ways compared to what we have today.

Perhaps the first thing I would recommend is Steam's built-in Remote Play feature along with their apps. This is the most dummy-proof method, though you can get better/more customizable results with Sunshine/Moonlight and of course you aren't tied down to Steam if you are using Sunshine/Moonlight. (Not that being tied down to Steam is particularly limiting since Steam can launch non-Steam applications and games)

There are a lot of YouTube guides out there if you prefer that way, or another way to go is to have an AI help you.

For example, I had some trouble recently getting my streaming setup to work and I just kept asking AI what to investigate, and it turned out my Linux distro software firewall was defaulted to blocking the streaming ports on my desktop system.

I recommend trying local network only to get started and only worry about Internet streaming later as that process is a little more involved. Though, maybe it's not if you already have your own home VPN like Wireguard or Tailscale.

It'll really work best if your desktop is wired. Clients being on WiFi is usually okay, especially if you have 6Ghz support...of course, wired everywhere is most ideal.

Admittedly, none of this is anywhere near as convenient as the black magic that PS Remote Play does. That is a downright incredible user experience. But still, I encourage you to give it another go!

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#12
I'm down to try this new rust server. It seems to replace either Sunshine or the more recent fork Apollo. They both work fine

Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis.

I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight clients.

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#13

> Moonshine runs each streaming session in its own isolated environment, separate from your desktop. This means your host PC stays usable while you stream, and it works without an active desktop session. So does this create like a virtual desktop? How does that work? Is this just a separate "screen" or is this more like an entirely separate compositor instance (if thats the right term here)?

From the features section:

> Isolated streaming sessions: Each stream runs in its own compositor, completely separate from your desktop environment.

So yes, a compositor per session. I love the idea of a gaming box that can host multiple instances; that would be very very good.

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#14

I'm down to try this new rust server. It seems to replace either Sunshine or the more recent fork Apollo. They both work fine Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis. I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight…

Apollo has native support for virtualized displays, which is handy for a headless server… I just switched this weekend from Sunshine so I didn’t have to go buy a $10 dummy hdmi dongle to fake a display

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#17
The Sunshine/Moonlight combo allowed me to stream emulated, upscaled SSX Tricky (PS2 game) from my desktop to an (at least 7 year-old) Android streaming box as smooth as silk.

The only downside was that the game had to be running, visibly, on the screen of the desktop machine, meaning the desktop is unusable for anything else - ie. if someone else wanted to play the game while I was working on the desktop.

This appears to solve that. Sunshine/Moonlight was already cake with a fair layer of icing. This is a sprinkling of glacé cherries on top. I love glacé cherries.

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#18
I spent quite a while trying to set up streaming from my laptop to my phone using Sunshine/Moonlight. I never got decent results despite following tutorials that were supposed to make it all very easy.

Gaming is something I do to relax and I eventually decided it wasn't worth it since I had spent a week of my limited downtime messing around with codecs, latency, wifi settings, trying different apps, etc. and not gotten any kind of usable results.

I guess it was about three years ago. Have things improved since then?

Re: Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

#20

Since this doesn't take over the desktop (per the FAQ) this sounds amazing for headless machines. Shame it needs such a modern GPU and $feature which isn't offered by my preferred Alpine Linux. But that shouldn't detract from what it's promising.

That's not too bad, being able to go all the way back to an RTX20XX or RX 6000 series is pretty old for the kind of person looking to stream some games. If you go back much further your client device might just have enough horsepower to run the game you're trying to play without streaming at all!

As an added point of reference, Turing released in late 2018 and RDNA2 released in late 2020.

I Googled a little to see if the GTX 1660/Ti supported Vulkan Video and found this page from Nvidia[1] that says Pascal or later, so I wonder what the blocker is in this program.

1: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan/video/get-started

Post reply on HN