Look ma, no lag! Developer showcases lightweight solution for streaming PC games

https://youtu.be/jBxM_beYfZY

Notebooks afford us the luxury of surfing the web or playing games virtually anywhere. Unless you’re prepared to shell out the big bucks necessary for agaming-grade notebook, however, you can pretty much rule out the possibility of playing modern titles at anything close to decent quality.

A new tool from app developer Dominic Szablewski looks to provide a viable workaround. Best yet, it won’t cost you a single cent.

Szablewski, creator of Instant Webcam, said he was inspired to build the app after seeing Larry Gadea use Amazon EC2 and Steam In-Home Streaming to create a personal cloud gaming platform.

His tool, jsmpeg-vnc, is a lightweight Windows application written in C. It captures the screen at 60 FPS, encodes it into MPEG1, sends it to a browser on another device across your local network which is then decoded in JavaScript using jsmpeg. Inputs (like a keyboard and mouse) are beamed back to the host system with minimal lag, essentially creating a platform that’s very similar to Nvidia’s GameStream technology.

Szablewski admitted the app works much better than it should.

Using his system as a test bed, Szablewski said latency typically hovers around 50ms to 70ms. On an 800 x 600 resolution stream, CPU utilization on his Core i5 checked in at around seven percent.

If you want to give it a try, the full source code and binary releases are available to download on GitHub.