Steam In-Home Streaming for Games Now Available to Everyone

After announcing the feature back in September, bringing it to closed beta soon after, and then finally making it open beta on May 1, Valve on Tuesday made the Steam In-Home Streaming feature available for all - at least on Windows. The company promises to bring support on Linux, Mac and SteamOS soon.

Steam's In-Home Streaming allows players to stream/ play games from their Steam library on their gaming PC, to any other computer connected on the same network.

(Also see: Steam Family Sharing now open to all; developers can create own sales)

Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote base computer and sent to the player's computer elsewhere in the house. Player input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player's (client) computer to the base (server) computer.

Valve, making the announcement on a dedicated Steam store page, said for now users will with the In-Home Streaming feature be able to stream Windows games from their gaming rigs to computers running other operating systems - currently support Mac, Linux and SteamOS, and "support for more systems coming soon."

(Also see: Valve releases updated SteamOS beta version, now supports dual-boot)

To use the feature, users will have to install and log into Steam clients on both computers (with the base machine running a Windows version higher than XP) on their home (wired recommended) network. Users can then visit their Steam library on the second computer, and start streaming the game.

Valve recommends a minimum of a quad-core CPU for the computer running the game. While the client requirements are more modest, it requires a GPU that supports hardware accelerated H264 decoding. Lowering game resolution and turning off vertical sync in the graphics options is recommended. For more information, users can visit the Steam support page.

(Also see: Valve announces 13 Steam Machine partners, teases specifications)

With the expected but still welcome move for PC gamers, Valve is certainly challenging the dominance of the home console in the living room space. Sony's PlayStation Now game streaming service, announced to much excitement in January, is still in private beta across platforms, despite being the only way PS4 owners can enjoy the vast library of (their own) PS3 games -something the much-requested backward compatibility would have solved.

Sony's Gaikai-powered version of the game streaming service differs from Valve's, with the game being processed remotely in the cloud, and not at the user location.