Steam in-home streaming?

[Dipso]

Would it be possible to add games for in-home streaming?

My HTPC is not a powerhouse, favouring silence and small form factor over grunt. Therefore i need to use in-home streaming to run more modern games.

In-home streaming works great for most of the games I use it with and it would be awesome if I could add the games i like to play on my TV to Launchbox.

Is there any way for setting up launch box to launch the games with streaming?

NOTE: I haven't looked closely at the steam functionality of launchbox yet, and this might already be documented somewhere. If so, just let me know and close the thread.

[DOS76]

We have a few users using Steam in home streaming with BigBox. @Zombeaveractually has his set up that way in his case I believe that he uses Steam to launch BigBox as a non steam application and then from there he can launch anything. Hopefully he can fill in the info as I'm just giving you a run down of something I read about awhile ago.

[Zombeaver]

Yep, you can absolutely do this. The only caveat is that whatever emulator you're using needs to have Xinput support, and in some cases emulators require a bit of additional tweaking (beyond what's required simply to get it to work via LB/BB) in order for it to work properly via In-Home Streaming. Many emulators support Xinput natively (like Retroarch for example) and some can have it patched in. There are some older (but still valid) posts I made on the Steam forums about how to do this for various emulators here:

Has anyone got project 64 working?

Steam Link + Retroarch

I use a Steam Link in my living room to stream from my primary PC upstairs. It's functionally identical to streaming from PC to PC via Steam In-Home Streaming. You just need to add Launchbox / Big Box as a non-steam application in Steam and launch it from there once you begin streaming.

Let me know if you have any questions or if there's an emulator in particular that you're having issues with.

EDIT: I mention in one of those posts that LB/BB have issues with recognizing controller inputs via In-Home Streaming, but that's actually been addressed since that post was made. LB/BB didn't have Xinput support at the time

[Dipso]

I suspect you have things a bit backwards, but it gives me hope that what I want can be achieved.

I don't want to stream my emulators, they run fine on my HTPC, i just want to add the few games i run on my livingroom that requires the grunt of the big one to launchbox.

But if i understand you correctly i have to run launchbox in its entirety through steam for this to work. If that is the case i think i'm just going to stick with launching steam and launchbox seperately.

But good tips if i ever want to emulate some systems that don't run good on my HTPC.

Thanks for your replies.

 

[Zombeaver]

Well I mean you can add whatever you want to Launchbox (it doesn't have to be emulators). If you're streaming them from the host PC and you wanted to use them in combination with Launchbox, you would need to point Launchbox (on the host) to their launch ID, stream Launchbox as your non-steam application, and launch them from there. If you right-click on their shortcut in your start menu and go to properties, in the target field you'll see something like "steam://rungameid/######". This just needs to be copied into a Launchbox entry in the "rom/application" field and it'll launch just fine. Launching it via ID is functionally identical to just loading up the Steam UI and pressing "play game".

If you're asking if you can add a game that's on the host to an instance of Launchbox on your HTPC then...no I don't think so. I stream an instance of Launchbox on the host with everything setup there. The Steam Link doesn't have a hard drive or self-contained functionality, it's just a streaming box, so that was my only option. If there's a way to create a shortcut directly to stream a specific game from the host onto your HTPC, it would be possible. I'm not sure how (or if it's possible) to do that though.

I found a couple of topics about it on Steam but nobody seems to have come up with a way to do it:

Shortcuts to stream

In-Home Streaming command line standalone

According to a Valve post here (in February), the functionality doesn't yet exist:

desktop shortcuts to streaming games

Quote

We haven't yet added that functionality, but it's a good idea!

Short of some kind of hack job, that'd be the way to do it.

[Dipso]

Yea, this is what i was asking

Its as i feared. There is no way to tell steam to launch a game in "streaming mode"

Oh, well my setup is working great as it is, was just an idea to streamline tings a bit.

Thank you for all your excellent replies.

Edited August 24, 2016 by Dipso

[greentie]

super old thread but i wondered as well, i found that if i turned both machines on and then added Steam games to launchbox it picks them up, then in bigbox i launched CSGO on my htpc and it worked perfect?