There are some exciting changes in today's Steam client beta update!
First off, SteamVR (formerly known as OpenVR), Valve's alternate reality SDK, has been officially shipped. Hopefully we'll see some developer documentation pop up soon so developers can integrate it into their games.
SteamVR also brings VR support inside Steam's Big Picture. Read this if you want to try it out.
And if a fancy VR mode isn't enough, the In-Home Streaming client has been shipped as well!
It wasn't mentioned in the changelog, probably because it is currently undergoing a limited invite-only beta test.
Update: The first batch of invites have been sent out!
Going off the Known Issues list from the below FAQ page and the fact there are streaming client binaries for Windows, OSX and Linux you'll be able to stream from and to any supported Steam platform.
Steam In-Home Streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game itself is actually running on another computer somewhere else in your home network. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer (server) and sent to the players computer (client). The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the players computer (client) to the actual game on the remote computer (server).
– In-Home Streaming FAQ page
Codecs
These codecs seem to be implemented, we're not sure until we have an invite but it looks like a promising start.
Video
- Raw
- H.264
- VP8
Audio
- Raw
- Opus
- Ogg Vorbis
These codecs are referenced in the internals of the streaming client, and might or might not pop up at one point.
- HuffYUV
- ULY0
- H.265
- VP9
- ORBX
Launch arguments
These are internally called upon by the Steam Client, but do give a nice overview of the capabilities.
Usage: %s [--windowed] [--novsync] [--nohwaccel] [--captureres WxH] [--framerate N] [--bitrate N (Kbit/s)] [--debug] [--testlocallatency] accountname
- --appid
- --bitrate N (Kbit/s)
- --captureres WxH (like 1920x1080)
- --debug
- --framerate
- --fullscreen or --windowed
- --noinput
- --nohwaccel or --hwaccel
- --novsync or --vsync
- --server ip address
- --testlocallatency