Comment on What do you use for self hosting a streaming service like Geforce Now?
Dasnap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you mean streaming the games running on your hardware or just hosting the Geforce streaming client? I know a good chunk about the former but not the latter.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I’d be interested in hearing more about that.
Dasnap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Quick history: Nvidia used to provide their own in-home streaming solution called GameStream. This was built right into their GPU drivers and was fairly easy to set up. It has 2 issues.
Programmers being programmers decided to make open-source alternatives to both of these. First came Moonlight as a better streaming frontend on PC, Android, Android TV etc. Sunshine was also developed as a version of the backend that was hardware agnostic.
Nvidia then decided GameStream was distracting too much from Geforce Now and removed it from their drivers. This was widely regarded as a ‘dick move’. Thankfully, the previous 2 projects already existed, and the new interest in them hastened development.
This is good to know because coming into this new, you might wonder why both projects’ documentation mentions GameStream a lot. It’s legacy and dictated the goals of the projects.
For actual setup…
Start with Sunshine on your actual gaming PC. The currently maintained version of the project can be found here.
Sunshine has a pretty clean setup so just follow its steps and you should be good to get going initially. I personally wet it up as a Windows service so it starts at boot when I WoL my PC. It might also request to install a controller driver which I’d personally let it do to avoid any input headaches.
Moonlight is even easier depending on the device you’re using. It’s straight up on the Google Play Store and I assume other places. The most technical part of the setup is that it might request some specific port-forwards, but I’d assume if you’re on this community, then you won’t have a problem with that. To get your Sunshine and Moonlight to communicate, you’ll need to get ML to ping the IP of your SS PC and produce a link code which you then input into the SS web UI.
If you’re wanting to play on your PC remotely, then that’s also possible! You’ll either want to just expose the requested Moonlight ports publicly or (what I do) setup a Wireguard VPN on your local network to connect to (I don’t like exposing too many ports).
I didn’t proofread this essay so sorry for any nonsense I’ve written.
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Me too :)
Hominine@lemonine.hominine.xyz 1 year ago
/u/Voroxpete /u/Otter linked above. Sunshine is compiled to run on Linux and Windows, streams applications or the desktop itself, runs in the background, and will attempt to leverage gpu hardware to do the heavy lifting.