Steam In-Home Streaming
Moving one step closing to making PC gaming easily accessible in preparation for the upcoming Steam machines, Steam In-Home Streaming allows you to play games anywhere in your home by streaming from one PC to another. The best part is no additional hardware is necessary and it’s possible as long as the two computers are on the same network, and you can even switch mid-game. It’s now currently possible to log in to Steam with the same account on two computers, and I can’t stress how something so simple makes the world of difference for me. If you game on more than one computer using Steam you’ve been subjected to being logged out automatically on another so you can’t even view without having to go through this every time but that’s not the case anymore. You can start a game on your computer in one room, pause it and go to another computer and resume your game. This isn’t revolutionary, of course, but considering your host computer is responsible for meeting all the game’s hardware requirements this gives you more flexibility depending on your network speed. So if you have that one game that works seamlessly on your desktop but your laptop just falls short of the requirements you should be perfectly fine streaming to your laptop without a hitch in gameplay.
To start streaming make sure you have it enabled first by going to View -> Settings -> In-Home Streaming and you should see the other computer connected on your network. You can change some options depending on your router to prioritize traffic, among other things, in order to increase performance. You then go to start your game the way you normally would by going to your library but instead of ‘Start’ you’ll see ‘Stream’ in its place for games not installed on your computer. If you have the game currently open on the PC you’ll be streaming from you’ll jump right into it controlling it remotely, and if not, the game will automatically be opened on the host computer for you to control remotely. This saves me a lot of time walking back and forth between my bedroom and living room so I couldn’t be happier with it. Now if only it could get me something to drink…hmmm.
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