Steam adds low-latency Pyrowave codec to Remote Play

Steam adds low-latency Pyrowave codec to Remote Play (Image credit: Valve) Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Subscribe to our newsletter Game streaming over your local area network is cool, but game streaming as typically implemented is basically a hack. It borrows video streaming technology and applies it to interactive games, which isn't actually a great fit, like so many cases of using a tool for a task it wasn't really designed for.

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• (Image credit: Valve) Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Subscribe to our newsletter Game streaming over your local area network is cool, but game streaming as typically implemented is basically a hack.
• It borrows video streaming technology and applies it to interactive games, which isn't actually a great fit, like so many cases of using a tool for a task it wasn't really designed for.
• Legendary open-source dev Hans-Kristian "TheMaister" Arntzen (known for the libretro framework and Retroarch frontend), decided to tackle this problem by making a video codec called Pyrowave specifically designed for in-home game streaming, and now, that exact codec is implemented in the Steam beta client .
• Your LAN has less than 10 milliseconds of latency; less than one millisecond if it's wired.
• However, in-home game streaming rarely achieves latency anywhere close to that because the process of rendering the game, encoding a video, sending it over the network, and then decoding it (before you can even see the new frame and react) usually takes upwards of tens of milliseconds, meaning that even on a LAN it's possible to have noticeable input lag when streaming.
• PyroWave seriously cuts down the delay at the "Decode" and "Encode" portions of this process.