BRIEF GUIDE: Moonlight (nVidia GeForce Experience / GameStream) free in-home/over-internet streaming, better than Steam Link! With Steam Big Picture trick in guide!

If you've got an nVidia card (required), this is the best streaming experience.

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Why is it better than Steam Link:

• Created by nVidia with a proprietary protocol for lowest-latency gaming. nVidia has been accused of throttling performance of competing apps, which is one of many reasons why nVidia's solution has lower latency.
• Only solution that supports HDR streaming. As long as your receiving device reports that it supports HDR, the GPU goes into HDR mode. Looks amazing to see proper HDR without needing any HDMI cables.
• Supports HEVC (H.265). Steam link does that too.
• Supports up to 4K @ 60 FPS. Steam link does that too.
• Supports up to 120 FPS, actually. But compatibility depends on the receiving device.
• The picture quality is slightly better than Steam Link.
• The encoding in this streaming protocol is incredible. There are no micro-stutters, unlike Steam Link which permanently micro-stutters (looks like low framerate and made me motion-sick) when I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a 100mbit wired connection via Steam Link. With nVidia's GameStream, the gameplay is perfectly fluid. (And I'm using a RTX 2070, so it's not my graphics card. It's Steam Link that isn't good enough.)
• Automatically optimizes the desktop resolution for the receiving device, to avoid wasting more bandwidth than necessary.
• Latency example on my freaking PHONE (on home WiFi AC/N network): Frames are received in 0.3-2 milliseconds. The received frames are decoded on the receiver device (by the PHONE hardware) in ~25ms, which would be even faster if my receiver was faster. You can see all this by enabling the statistics overlay in Moonlight. So that's a total latency of less than 30ms, on a phone, over WiFi! Now imagine what your Android TV/wired device with powerful decoder hardware can do! You can expect 10-30ms gameplay! All of which is fast enough that most musicians could record music with that kinda latency (15ish-30ish ms is pretty unnoticeable even for a musician trying to follow exact timings). Basically you will not notice any latency. Anything happening on the host PC will happen on your receiver at the exact same time!

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What is Moonlight:

• It's a 3rd party, open source receiver for nVidia's "Shield TV" / GeForce Experience game streaming protocol.
• Exists for Android, iOS, tvOS (Apple TV), ChromeOS, Windows, Linux and Mac. In other words, for every OS!
• There's even an app port for Valve's Steam Link hardware device, if you own one of those.
• Depending on your receiver device, the experience will be as good as a real Shield TV box. Your device should be able to decode 60 FPS, preferably H.265 @ 60 FPS with HDR.
• Perfect support for pretty much all game controllers (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, and PS4, and lots more). But note that you can pair your controller with the host PC instead, which is what I do. As long as you are within Bluetooth range (which I am), it makes sense to pair the controller to the PC for direct input.

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Small setup guide:

• Install Moonlight on your client/receiver device. The Android app exists for most devices, even the FireTV's built-in store has Moonlight on it.
• Read its quick start guide. Basically you just go to your computer, open GeForce Experience, go into Settings, then Shield, and then enable "GameStream".
• You can add your games to the launcher menu, but I honestly prefer Steam's "Big Picture" menu. It's possible to add a direct shortcut to launching Big Picture. To do so, follow the separate guide below.
• On your receiver device, simply connect to the device and it will ask you to type the PIN on your computer. Do this, and the devices will be paired. That's it!
• You SHOULD go through the advanced Moonlight settings to enable H.265 (HEVC) video, HDR support, etc. But that's up to you and your particular setup/client app, etc. For example, on my Huawei P30 (modern Android phone with OLED display, HDR support etc), I went into advanced, "Change H.265 settings" and "Always use H.265", and ticked "Enable HDR". But all of those settings (whether work or even exist) will depend on your devices!

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Adding Steam Big Picture to nVidia GameStream:

• This is highly recommended because it means you can enjoy a nice Steam game menu without any need to manually add individual games to GameStream.
• You're going to need to make a .bat file, because nVidia GameStream does not support adding "command line switches" to programs. So we'll have to code it ourselves.
• Open Notepad and type the following code: start "Steam Big Picture" "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\Steam.exe" -start steam://open/bigpicture
• Go to File - Save As, and set "Save as type" dropdown to "All files" (IMPORTANT), then navigate anywhere you wanna save this launcher and name the file "Steam Big Picture.bat". I chose to save mine on the desktop.
• Try double-clicking on that file. If it launches Steam Big Picture, you're done. If not, you did something wrong and should redo the above steps.
• Now go into GeForce Experience's GameStream settings, and click the Add button and navigate your "Steam Big Picture.bat" file. Add it.
• And if you want a nice cover art (I do), just click Edit on the added link and click on the Box Art image. Apply any image you want, but note that it should be in portrait orientation, so for a really nice result you will probably have to use a photo editor to crop the image. The image should be ~1.435x taller than its width. For example, I took a 1280x720 steam logo wallpaper, and then did 720 / 1.435 = ~502, meaning I should make a 502x720 image. Then I was super lazy and went to https://www.iloveimg.com/crop-image, uploaded the imagae, and typed in 502x720 and placed the selection where I wanted it. The result was this image, if you wanna be more lazy than I was and just re-use my boxart: https://i.imgur.com/KEQxKEa.jpg
• Aight, enjoy! Now you can be lazy and just launch Steam Big Picture from your client devices, and from there you have your perfect Steam menu to select all your games, rather than having to add each game individually to GameStream. And as you probably know, you can add non-steam games to steam so that you can launch those via its Big Picture menu too!
• Note that if you've enabled Moonlight's HDR option, you will see a small notification when you launch Steam Big Picture saying "This game does not support HDR", and the stream will be running in non-HDR mode.

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Running games in HDR

• If you have HDR-streaming capable hardware (seems to need GeForce 10-series or later) and a game that supports it, then you can stream in HDR.
• To do that, you must add the game individually to the GameStream launcher, because HDR is negotiated/detected at the launch of the app/game you start. So, as mentioned above, Steam's Big Picture will not be running in HDR, and neither will any games launched via that session.
• That being said... HDR isn't super necessary. Even without HDR, the OLED screen of my phone makes Red Dead Redemption 2 look lifelike.

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Have fun!

Submitted by svartchimpans | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016