Create Your Own Cloud Gaming Server at Home

yes and you're here with tape tech and today we're gonna be talking about something really cool we're actually gonna walk you through how to build your own cloud game streaming server with your computer at home now the reason that you might want to do this is a so you don't have to pay for one and be because this will give you access to all of your mods your emulators and any games that just aren't supported by these other cloud gaming services now this will be dependent on you having a solid internet connection but short of that should work without any issues and in my own testing works as good or better in certain cases then a lot of the other game streaming services out there so let's jump on in and take a look at how to get this set up so we're going to be taking a look at two different programs that are going to power our server the first one is called say night and it's actually a library manager similar is steam or any of the others what's special about play night is that it has a desktop interface as well as a big picture interface again similar to steam but it is actually able to launch games from all the major launchers without you having to interact with the launcher so that pesky battle night launcher don't worry you click play and play night and it'll go ahead and launch that launch the game and then minimize that client or close it for you taking out all of the manual work and extra clicks so with this we can always have this running in the fullscreen the big picture mode at startup and then whenever we dial into our designated game streaming server if that's how you intend to use it then you can actually use it with a mouse and keyboard or remote control it doesn't matter it'll work on any device that you can log into your server on and we'll have a great interface similar to a console that will immediately let you launch games from any of the other launchers the second program we're going to be using is called parsec and this is really what's going to power our server so parsec is essentially a remote desktop program designed very specifically around gaming and low latency now in my testing what you're going to find is inside the home latency on my machines are around 15 to 16 what that equates to is about one frame of delay which you'd be really hard-pressed to notice in most games especially if you're not really attuned to that game and or a professional gamer now while this won't be a viable solution for professional competitive gaming it's really great if you just want to kick back and enjoy your games on the go or you want the convenience of saying oh my girlfriend or boyfriend came in and they need the TV so I'm just gonna shoot it over to my phone and keep playing you can do that so with that out of the way let's get these installed and let's take a look at them so the first program that were going to be looking at today is play night and you can get to it by going to play night dot link and I'll include these links in the description of the video below but this is what we're gonna use to actually manage all of our games and launch them and manage all of the launchers so this is going to be really easy you're just going to go to download and what we're gonna want to do is download installer while you can use the portable version the idea is we're building a game streaming server this will likely be a desktop that's gonna be very stationary you're not going to be moving the actual launcher around a lot so it lets download the normal installer for now you'd be fine to download portable to my knowledge it works mostly the same I don't know of any limitations between the two but let's be safe and use the version that I am comfortable with myself so you'll click download and you'll just run through the installer there's nothing special it'll just very standard ask you hey you sure you want to install there's no adware or anything like that it's very clean so go ahead and install that now the second thing that we're going to be looking at is parsec again this is what's actually going to stream our games for us we'll be downloading this on the host PC as well as the client PC so we're gonna go right here to download and you're just gonna hit download for Windows now you'll see that there are downloads for Mac Android Raspberry Pi and Linux now these are all client only versions the parsec actually uses a native system that's built into Windows so only Windows machines can serve as a host now it's one client and it adapts on its own so essentially once you download the Windows version that'll serve as both a host and client and if you download the Mac Android raspberry Pi or Linux versions they will be client only the reason this is important is if you have two Windows machines you're going to download the Windows version there's no difference between the client and the host version those don't exist it's just one package so you're gonna go ahead and just download this on both of your computers if you're using Mac Android etc you'll go ahead and just download the Windows version on your host and then download the appropriate version on your client device awesome same thing as with play night it's very clean there's no adware just go ahead and run through the Installer and get it set up so now that we have parsec up and running you've created the account you've logged in and you've done this on your host device and your client device what you'll notice is we're on our client device here and we actually have the ability to dial right in to our host device which is also set up with our parsec account so if we click connect here awesome so we're in play night big picture mode and we can see all of our games here and if we want to we can actually go ahead and click into one and see details I actually never use this in keyboard mode so I actually don't know how to view the details of a game but that's alright we'll explore that a little bit later anyway let's go ahead and disconnect from parsec for parsec all you need to do is make sure that you go into your settings and on your host device you'll need to go to host and you'll need to enable hosting without this enabled your client devices won't actually be able to connect you won't see a pop up in the list of computers over here in our computers tab the other thing is you'll want to make sure that you leave most of this the same you know there's descriptions here they're really helpful the one thing that you'll need to make sure that you play around with is on the host in the host tab you'll want to go and make sure that you play around your bandwidth I found for 1080p gaming 5015 excuse me megabits per second is perfectly fine if you're going to 1440 let's bump up to 20 or 25 and if you trying to do 4k really 35 to 40 is your sweet spot now again your network has to be able to support these kinds of upload speeds so it's important that you kind of do a little testing and play around might take a while before you get it right now this is only if you're accessing it externally if you are on the same network so the phone you're streaming to or the computer streaming to and your hosts are on the exact same Wi-Fi network or even LAN network so you're wired by Ethernet then it'll actually connect with as much bandwidth as it can muster so it will actually bypass this limit and if we use whatever it needs to so you're probably gonna get a lot less latency because you're right there on the same network and you'll see that things are quite a bit more seamless for in-home streaming which is primarily what I use but it works great for out of the home as well as long as you are connected to a decent Wi-Fi connection awesome so next let's take a look at play night okay so we are actually dialed in here to our hosting PC right and here's play night in big picture mode it's pretty freakin awesome and it's actually really easy to use so first let's go ahead and click the play night icon and let's drop out into desktop mode a lot of your configuration has to be done in desktop mode so if you're just a PC gamer and you really don't need the big picture move this is also awesome it will also launch all the games show you all the details automatically import art and descriptions and everything like that just like that so when you initially run play night you'll actually set up it will ask you what accounts you have so if you have an F games account an Xbox account all those things it'll automatically import all the installed games on your computer you can also go up here and you can open the clients directly you'll see extensions you don't don't worry about these these are mostly what manage importing the games and in your library you'll be able to actually configure emulation if you have emulators you can add those and then finally you can add a game so you can add it manually you can just scan everything at an emulated game or specifically at a Microsoft Store application so it may not just be games you can have whatever you want here for quick launching so now that you have this all you do is you click Play and it launches the game so let's actually take a look at something that stadia did that I kind of laughed at during their demonstration they showed someone picking up a game from a PC or from a computer to a TV to a phone some variation of that it may be a TV to computer to phone I think it was I think it was that one anyway let's actually shoot it from our host PC to our client PC and then pick it up right on her phone let's let me show you that that's possible for free without you paying Google for very limited games and no permanent versions so yeah alrighty guys so we're gonna do something a little bit fun here I'm gonna demo basically what they did with Google stadia and show you that using free tools and your computer at home you can do this so we're on our client device here our desktop is basically running the full server set up and we're just going to connect and we have this Xbox one controller just plugged via USB into the client laptop here so all of the input controls are actually coming from the laptop and not the host device directly and what you'll notice is right off the bat the actual input is pretty much real-time it'd be really hard for me to measure the latency on the input alone but it is unnoticeable to me now the video stream obviously will is have some delay and you will notice it but it's very very very minor unless you were playing competitive FPS games or anything with lightning fast reaction time requirements you really would be hard-pressed to notice the difference especially when streaming over your own network at home so let's take a look here and we're streaming at 1080p let's go ahead and launch Dark Souls now you may notice my Dark Souls looked a little bit different than yours that is actually because I'm running the cinders mod I've beaten this game I mean a couple dozen times with the million different pills and I found the Centers mod and it's friggin awesome it it really changes how the entire game plays out it seems like it makes you a little bit overpowered but trust me it's it's pretty difficult depending on how you decide to play but of course that's Dark Souls for you if you if you want to run an easy build feel free but you know you can also make it as difficult as you want to okay so let's go ahead and drop in the game and I want you guys to pay attention specifically to the latency between the client and the host device now remember this client device is actually over Wi-Fi so I have my host server hard-lined into the router and this is connected over five gigahertz Wi-Fi so right off the bat what you're probably going to notice is the latency is extremely minimal if I go in and let's get into a little bit of a fight here I'm having really no problem and I'm actually staring at the laptop screen here and an extremely weird angle and it's still perfectly fine awesome well that's all well and good but let's say I was really streaming this to my TV and my significant other comes in and they want me to leave so they can use the TV great why don't we disconnect from our laptop here and let's pop over to our phone and let's connect on our phone all of a sudden it is perfectly playable on our phone as well and you notice we have about the same amount of latency I've actually noticed the phone is a little bit better I don't know why I haven't really done an in-depth dive it could just be the eye GPU that's used in my laptop just isn't great but I've noticed the phone is I mean damn near unnoticeable when we are local Wi-Fi so just a demo of you know all that wonderful new-age demo hype that stadia tried to present to you as something that just was out of this world and only they could accomplish well here you go this is free just using the stuff that I already owned so clearly that wasn't true and you can set this up for yourself as you've seen really easily so with that out of the way I I do want to dive into a couple of the pitfalls here so while this system is awesome there are some drawbacks it's not going to be perfect you are gonna notice a little bit of latency and you will notice some compression here and there especially in gun games when you're whipping back in a forward it's also really not viable for competitive gaming or anything with lightning quick reaction times needed in any consistency it's just not there yet cloud gaming is a beast and it's very new and it's going to take time to get that latency lower and lower and lower and lower also what you witnessed today was on a local network right I was right next to the server on the same router that the server is wired to so obviously that's gonna be a very best case scenario if you're trying to do this over 4G there are some playable games but you're gonna notice a couple frames of delay it'll be noticeable now if you're over 5g to my understanding you're gonna get mixed results but you might start to see some pretty awesome playable results especially on FPS games too so that's something to consider as 5g becomes more widely available this is gonna be viable just to like play on the train so that'll be pretty cool if your buddies have good internet they can actually dial into your server and play with you but again here's another limitation this is dependent on your total available upload bandwidth because each person that connects is sharing that total maximum so if you've said it for 15 megabits per second for 1080p gaming that's great for you but the minute you get another buddy or two buddies on all of a sudden you're all sharing that 15 megabit and it's not going to be great so it's best to dial the stream down to 720 or potentially if you have more bandwidth to spare you'll upload up that bandwidth cap as you are adding more buddies in so it is also important to note that turcica is not just for gaming parsecs seems to have pivoted themselves and really highlighted that ad work Photoshop video editing all of these things are perfectly viable for parsec now because of the way that it's compressed any kind of color grading or color specific work probably isn't going to be doable on parsec but if all you need is to jump in and do a quick video edit or you know mess with a model perfectly fine I myself have actually done that many times and have found it not only perfectly usable but I honestly forget that I'm using parsecs sometimes especially if the Internet is half decent so really just get out there and explore set it up for yourself figure out what you want to use it for if you want to use it for the cloud game streaming server project please go ahead you want to use it for something else go ahead it's it's there and it's free so what I really want you to take home is that cloud gaming is great it's really cool but there are an inherent downsides a lot of these services don't have every game and a lot of them you don't even own a physical copy of the game if you leave their service your games are gone even though you spent potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars on them this way you own all of your stuff you can play it on your computer or you can stream it from your computer to your other device you own the entire means here additionally if you don't have a powerful PC all parsec is again is a remote client of remote desktop client so you can set up a paper space gaming machine and build your own actual cloud gaming server that has a gigabit connection while obviously you're gonna pay for because you're renting the PC the prices can be pretty reasonable depending on what configuration you get so for 20 30 bucks a month you get 40 hours of playable games a month so for those road warriors who just wants to play while they're traveling perfectly doable well guys thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe leave us comment below if you want to know any more information if you're interested in more videos about game streaming I have actually built a little Raspberry Pi streaming device that's connected to my TV and allows me to connect parsec there as well so I can kind of jump to any TV in the house or my phone or any of my computers anything and please please PLEASE this please hit us up and join our discord server our Twitter or Instagram any kind of likes or follows you can spare will really help us grow and we really appreciate you watching we'll see you on the next one bye

Channel: TaitTech.

Views: 40,242

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Id: ZJJgUF8z-ug

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020