Streaming Adventures

Recently I've been experimenting with Steam's In Home Streaming and Big Picture mode. I have a spare Mac Book Pro and Steam is available for Mac OSx now, so I thought I'd try it out. (Truth be told, it's been available for some time but this story will go beyond that.)

Valve recently released a new technology, In Home Streaming designed to allow gamers to play games even on platforms where their game of choice ianr supported. For example playing on the couch using a small laptop which might be more comfortable.  In Home Streaming is a client-server technology tgat works wothin your local network to capture the video and audio from your desktop computer and sending it to your laptop pc, and and the same time, sending to the inputs back to the host pc. Of course, it doesnt have to be a desktop to a laptop .Could be cross platform as well so you can play Windows games on a Linux or Mac pc.

In Home  Streaming works surprisingly well, passing the  game's output to the client and passing back the control to the server.

What I wanted to do was to be able to play PC games on the TV and use Logitech's F310 Xbox 360 compatible controllers. I'm going for the whole "lean back experience".

After much experimentation, i finally got all the pieces in place for playing games on the TV.

I tried to use the Mac natively but the game controllers weren't supported on Mac so I switched to using Windows under Boot Camp.

I'm not very good at playing games on a controller but racing games or simple games are ok. Music games like Audio Surf aee very fun on the TV with nice sound.

This post was actually created as part of a speed blogging session for BarCamp so it's a bit unplanned.