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

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

#131
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing almost the same exact thing for a while, except on Arch and with a different EDID than my actual display drive my handheld that I stream to is 16:10 rather than 16:9 like my actual monitor. After a couple of months something changed (maybe a kernel update, although I never fully tracked it down) where the kernel no longer respects the parameter about which display to use for the initial LUKS decrypt a…

If you have a tpm (or virtual tpm), you can enroll your passphrase for auto unlock. When sealing the tpm slot, you can decide how much should be sealed: kernel version, drivers, firmware updates, hardware changes etc.. meaning a kernel update can break the seal and ask for passphrase if you included kernel version in the seal. You can set it so the kernel/driver updates won't break your tpm seals. It's usually just o…

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding what you're suggesting, but my issue isn't that I want unlocking to be even more streamlined (since I'm fine with what I have and don't want fully auto unlock); it's just that I don't want the timeout that somehow started happening before it's even letting me manually unlock.

And yeah, I did try out various LLMs (including Claude) when it first started happening, but none of them were able to point me towards anything definitive about the cause, let alone the fix. In general I think it might be worth giving someone asking a question about something like this the benefit of the doubt about whether they've tried it, especially if you have outsized assumptions about how likely they are to solve problems. My experience is that when someone mentions having an issue, telling them "just ask Claude/Codex/etc." doesn't tend to end up being a very valuable contribution to discussions; people who are open to using LLMs for things will almost definitely have already done so, and people who haven't already are a lot more likely no to have done so for other reasons than the idea not having occurred to them. It's pretty hard to go more than even a few minutes into any sort of discussion about tech nowadays without someone bringing them up, so I think it's a pretty safe assumption that most people are well aware of them and considered them for whatever problem they're having.

To be clear, I'm not trying to berate you or anything but genuinely give feedback that might be helpful for you when trying to give advice on things like this in the future. Trying to give advice in a way that people will be receptive to can be difficult, especially when they're strangers on the internet, but I also think it's a a valuable way to spend time compared to a lot of other ways to spend time online, so I think it's worthwhile to invest time and effort into figuring out the best ways of doing it.

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

#132
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud is just someone else's computer. Do you think there's spare GPU compute available during the AI craze?

What if steam users could offer their computers up for credit on steam? Not sure if most consumer internet connections would be up for it, but that would be an interesting model.

I think it’s death by a thousand cuts. I think internet connections are the least of the issue. Plenty of people have gaming PCs wired to 1Gb/s fiber. It may even be better because users can be close together.

Where I see bigger issues is: 1. Economics. GeForce Now for a 5080 is 20ct/h. At retail prices you may get close in electricity.

2. Others want to game when I want to game. What good is offering my PC up at 5am? Who would want to use the service if you can’t reliably get access when you want it. Not to speak of the issue of getting kicked out when the owner wants their PC back.

3. The whole: do you trust someone else’s computer/do you trust others on your computer. Users don’t want their login details stolen or get banned for using a cheaters PC and providers don’t want you to cheat or do other nasty stuff. You can’t really do VMs because consumer GPUs don’t really support virtualization so dual booting

4. You need to dedicate a ton of disk space. Because of 3 you can’t really share and now you have to deal with some system to have the relevant games available.

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

#133

So, to sum up: First there was Nvidia Gamestream, which was proprietary and later deprecated by Nvidia themselves. Then came Sunshine and Moonlight, open source server and client implementations of the protocol to allow low latency streaming for all platforms. Along the way the Game on Whales project started, to allow multi seat streaming plus virtual displays so currently logged in user sessions aren't impacted. Bas…

Unfortunate it is still essentially impossible to share consumer GPUs with multiple virtualized hosts, which limits the utility. My dream is to build one beefy server and play old games like COD via connected thin clients

Thanks to the comment above I discovered Games on Whales and just read up on the possibilities. Isn’t that exactly your usecase? It seems you can stream to multiple underpowered systems provided you have network, RAM, GPU and enough cores. It even streams to Apple TV, Chromecast etc.

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

#134
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steam link actual. While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things. Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one…

Steam Link has saved my ass more times than I can count. VPN having issues, can't connect to any of my stack? Atleast I have a desktop on my LAN I can remote into...from my phone... Basically anytime I have network issues while I'm away, reliable Steam Link connects me back to my infra ~97% of the time.

Wait. Go on? Is this with or without the device?

For the record, I always wondered why I couldn't do something like this with whatever magic is happening under the hood with Syncthing.

I've been doing networking related things for over 20 years, and it's still wild what doesn't click for me...

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Sunshine _is_ headless, I would know if it weren't, I'm using it as such (albeit with a dummy plug, but that's just a hardware limitation).

You're technically right, and I appreciate your comment, but it's funny to me to be like 'It is headless! It just needs a fake head!'

Now you try working with a fake in your head's place! :þ But yeah, real head (a monitor; doesn't have to be on) also works just as well, and even no head at all works, just won't accelerate 3D. Arbitrary resolutions also work. My only complaint with sunshine is that the webui authentication is really broken. Fortunately I don't need to go there much.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia GPUs refuse to accelerate 3D w/o an output connected; if I had a Radeon, I wouldn't need the plug, it's just an Nvidia thing I believe. Afaict, Moonshine relies on a separate graphical session running on your monitor and that's how it gets around that limitation of Nvidia GPUs. If I had a monitor plugged in to my box, Sunshine would work just as well.

It’s possible to make a fake display to avoid that; both Linux and Windows have this ability. No dummy plug is required (though it is simpler than software solutions).

I don't use the dummy plug for display, it's only that consumer nvidia gpus won't have working 3D acceleration if there is nothing physically connected to the card. My dummy plug doesn't support the resolutions I run games at anyway.

EDIT: Ok, correction, I bothered to go unplug the dummy plug and it still works. So I was wrong, Sunshine does not need a dummy plug at all, not even on Nvidia. Now it remains a mystery why I have one in the first place if it's useless after all…

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

#137
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam Link has saved my ass more times than I can count. VPN having issues, can't connect to any of my stack? Atleast I have a desktop on my LAN I can remote into...from my phone... Basically anytime I have network issues while I'm away, reliable Steam Link connects me back to my infra ~97% of the time.

Wait. Go on? Is this with or without the device? For the record, I always wondered why I couldn't do something like this with whatever magic is happening under the hood with Syncthing. I've been doing networking related things for over 20 years, and it's still wild what doesn't click for me...

Steam Link creates an RDP session (I assume their own protocol but for lack of a better term for it) that lets me control my Desktop from my phone.

Once I'm remote on the desktop, I can access my home-lab locally instead of via VPN. Before I moved to Tailscale, my self-hosted Wireguard setup was pretty shaky, and was running on an old Pi that had seen better days.

It's basically just using Steam to jump-box to my LAN, and from there you can do whatever you desktop can do on the LAN. (Steam Link has some oddities around UAC prompts, usually requiring input from the host and refusing from the client.)

You could probably use anything....Parsec, Moonlight, RDP, etc. But Steam is always running on my Desktop, and the phone-app helps a lot. I've used Parsec as well, but sometimes if using a commercial VPN Parsec is unable to connect. Steam tends to still create a session in these scenarios, but YMMV...I'm sure there's some config issues in my setup

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

#138
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Go on? Is this with or without the device? For the record, I always wondered why I couldn't do something like this with whatever magic is happening under the hood with Syncthing. I've been doing networking related things for over 20 years, and it's still wild what doesn't click for me...

Steam Link creates an RDP session (I assume their own protocol but for lack of a better term for it) that lets me control my Desktop from my phone. Once I'm remote on the desktop, I can access my home-lab locally instead of via VPN. Before I moved to Tailscale, my self-hosted Wireguard setup was pretty shaky, and was running on an old Pi that had seen better days. It's basically just using Steam to jump-box to my LAN…

Aha, I'm getting back into this sort of thing, and I've always been a fan of Tinc for things like this, but it is showing its age.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if steam users could offer their computers up for credit on steam? Not sure if most consumer internet connections would be up for it, but that would be an interesting model.

I think it’s death by a thousand cuts. I think internet connections are the least of the issue. Plenty of people have gaming PCs wired to 1Gb/s fiber. It may even be better because users can be close together. Where I see bigger issues is: 1. Economics. GeForce Now for a 5080 is 20ct/h. At retail prices you may get close in electricity. 2. Others want to game when I want to game. What good is offering my PC up at 5am…

I agree with all those issues.

Just for discussion though: Economics don’t necessarily dominate these markets when providers aren’t informed - Uber drivers w/ depreciation for example. If your GPU is a sunk cost, and your electricity is cheap enough, it might be attractive (think consumers mining crypto back when).

A floating market rate or “surge pricing” could come into play. Outside of the top 10% of gamers by playtime, there’s plenty of idle compute during prime hours.

A secure environment would definitely be essential. SteamOS could be a great tool for that: dual boot SteamOS and make SteamBucks while you’re not using your computer.

You could only offer your machine for the titles you have downloaded. This again could be addressed by a market: popular titles could get more utilization, but obscure titles could command a premium.

No guarantee any of this would actually work, but it’d be an interesting model to explore if I were at Steam. They have hardware survey data, user activity, etc; to check viability.

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

#140

So, to sum up: First there was Nvidia Gamestream, which was proprietary and later deprecated by Nvidia themselves. Then came Sunshine and Moonlight, open source server and client implementations of the protocol to allow low latency streaming for all platforms. Along the way the Game on Whales project started, to allow multi seat streaming plus virtual displays so currently logged in user sessions aren't impacted. Bas…

Unfortunate it is still essentially impossible to share consumer GPUs with multiple virtualized hosts, which limits the utility. My dream is to build one beefy server and play old games like COD via connected thin clients

Not sure if LXCs would help in that regard as I haven't used it for gaming but you can share a GPU between LXC guests and the host. I have an unprivileged LXC running in Proxmox that uses the GPU for transcoding video.
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