Steam In-Home Streaming Feature Streams Screens (not just games!)

Aaron Newcomb/ May 22, 2014/ How-To

I dare you to say that title ten times fast. But it’s not just a tongue twister. It’s true! I tried out the new streaming feature using the Linux PC attached to my TV and I able to stream all the games I tested from my Windows PC. Then I happened to hit Alt-Tab on my Windows PC keyboard. Lo and behold there was my entire desktop. Just like VNC or any other remote control app I was able to navigate around, open other applications, and point and click to my hearts content. For the next test I opened up some tabs in chrome and tried to stream some video. No problem whatsoever. Netflix, Hulu and Vimeo all worked just fine. And why wouldn’t they? As far as those services are concerned they are running on a Windows 7 desktop with the requisite close source applications without any issues. Linux users have long had a desire to run streaming services like Netflix and Hulu for a long time, but have been stymied by requirements to run Microsoft Silverlight or other crapware that is unnecessary in this day and age from a technology standpoint. The benefit of Steam’s Streaming technique is that it is essentially a high quality compressed video stream with great audio. VNC and other remote viewing applications can have very choppy video and sometimes no audio at all. I found the quality even better than using Chromecast from the desktop with the Chrome Plugin. So if you don’t have the steam client loaded on your linux PC already, go get it and enjoy streaming your Windows desktop for all those applications that just don’t run on Linux/Mac and you just can’t do without … including games.

Here is a little video I recorded to show all the details.