STREAM EVERYTHING
Share your games, media, and your desktop online
WE’VE RELIED ON END-TO-END STREAMING for longer than we’ve relied on computers. Where would society be without the influence of radio or cable TV? Would we be quite the same if Major General George O Squier hadn’t developed Muzak’s earliest tech, a 1930s system of sending inoffensive music along electrical wires directly to elevators and stores? Well, probably. We might even be slightly more sane. But that’s not the point: Streaming has long been hugely important, and the Internet has completely democratized it.
You’re now free to send whatever you want wherever you want. You can push data, making it available to anyone who wants it, or pull streams, just for you, from a private source. You can work with audio, video, live cameras, or any other data that suits. You can use streaming for entertainment, for profit, or for practical benefits. And you can do it all, for the most part, for free. All you really need is a quality broadband connection on either end of the streaming path. You might not even need that, if your server hardware is robust enough to transcode media on the fly, converting it to a lower resolution that reduces bandwidth demands.
In this feature, we take you through as many different content streaming situations as possible, from games to sounds, and beyond. It’s all very situational and personal. Everything you might want to stream has slightly different methodology, unique software, and technical considerations to take into account. Many of the tools we talk about can be used for more than one thing, and the specific one you use is, at the end of the day, up to you.
We talk public and private streaming, and give a few suggestions as to how to take advantage of the former to increase your online profile. While it’s going to take a lot of work and a special kind of charisma to top Twitch’s 200,000-viewer record for a single streamer—and, indeed, its all-time stream record of over 1,000,000 for a CS: GO tournament match—there’s nothing stopping you from trying.
MEDIA LIBRARY STREAMING
Right off the bat, Plex Media Server is, by far, the slickest and cleanest solution for getting video and audio content that you own from a personal server on to basically any device anywhere in the world. Originally developed as a fork of XBMC (now Kodi), Plex has, over the past nine years, evolved into an extremely capable media host, which can look after everything from your music to your video content, and even, if you sign up for the monthly Plex Pass service, serve as a backup method for critical files such as photos. It offers apps for every major games console, and for cell phones and tablets, includes compatibility with the Google Chromecast and Amazon Fire Stick, and has a fully-featured web interface for everything else. The server itself can run on a number of devices—you may even be able to get it going on your NAS—but we recommend something solid. Check the “Right Hardware” box opposite to see the kind of gear you should be aiming for to get maximum performance.
Getting it set up is simple. Grab the appropriate installer for your device from http://plex.tv/downloads, and run it. It’s a straightforward installer, no surprises. When it’s over, you have to run through a bit of first-time setup in a browser window. This basically just involves creating an account on the Plex.tv website—Plex handles online translation and routing for you, which makes for vastly simplified remote streaming—and running through a few self-explanatory steps, including setting up a folder for your media. This can reside, realistically, wherever you’d like, although it’s most efficient to use a drive directly connected to the computer that’s running the server, because pulling from network storage in order to send media via the network doubles up the bandwidth required—unless you opt for the cloud option (part of the Premium package), which accesses content on storage providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive, and doesn’t require a server PC at all.
With everything in place, you have access to your entire media library from anywhere. Just sign in to the Plex client, on any device, with the credentials you set earlier, or head to http://plex.tv/web in a browser window. If your files are named correctly (see http://bit. ly/1Rxz8Ca), the server polls sites such as The Movie Database, Last.fm, and TheTVDB for thumbnails, episode information, and even trailers, and automatically arranges your media. Honestly, it’s ridiculously easy, and compatible with just about every format—the most difficult thing you have to do is collect together and rip your media.
In theory, you have other choices if you’re already tied into a different ecosystem. You could, with a bit of fiddling with SSH and VPN tunneling, make a Kodi library available online, or use VLC ( www.videolan.org) to stream any kind of media locally. Alternatively, PlexBMC ( http://bit.ly/2gCxAvq) can funnel the contents of a Plex media server into a Kodi client. Subsonic ( www.subsonic.org) was designed solely for audio streaming, but also includes rudimentary video streaming capabilities, and works in a very similar way to Plex. And, hey, if you’re happy to forget about controlling precisely what you can watch, you could always eliminate the worry of compiling a media library, and sign up for a dedicated streaming service such as Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, et al.
DESKTOP STREAMING
Now for something more practical: remote controlling your PC. There are several easy options for taking your desktop on the road, many of which have been around for a long time. VNC, for instance, is a well-seasoned open-source remote desktop client, highly configurable, with several different ( but compatible) spins. Try TightVNC ( www. tightvnc.com) or RealVNC ( www.realvnc. com) if you’re leaning in this direction; run the server app on the machine you want to access, and set a strong password—VNC’s ports are, given that they offer up full access to your PC, often targeted by rogues.
Windows has a desktop streaming tool included in the form of Microsoft Remote Desktop, which can pick out individual apps from your desktop, and stream them seamlessly without the rest of it, and has client apps for phones and other operating systems. It’s well featured and really rather good, but it’s not our top pick. We’re leaning toward something that, like Plex, does all the hard work for you: TeamViewer ( www. teamviewer.com). It may be the most attractive among these tools in terms of the ease of its interface, and it’s generally used for idiot-proof remote support purposes, but it’s entirely feasible to set it up for easy access to your own hardware.
When you’ve downloaded and run its installer, select “Unattended.” Now, when you first run TeamViewer, you’re given a wizard to run through; you don’t need to sign up for an account, you can use it anonymously if you choose. Note down the ID number you’re given at the end of the process, and you can use it in conjunction with the password you set earlier to gain
access to your desktop at any time, by using a TeamViewer app or through the website. The app also shows another password; it changes every boot, and you can give this to folks you want to be able to access your machine without knowing your login details.
One thing to note: Streaming your desktop is generally much more demanding, and slower, than streaming a media collection, because your videos and audio have been encoded in a format that reduces their size and required bandwidth. TeamViewer and its ilk usually do some work to negate this, such as blanking your desktop background, dropping the color depth, and compressing the stream on the fly, but this does increase sluggishness. If you’re trying to throw the raw contents of a 4K desktop down your Internet connection, don’t expect to comfortably run graphically demanding applications, or for the experience to be the same as being sat at your desk.
If you want pinpoint control over the minutiae of your desktop streaming, there’s an option you may not have considered: VLC media player. Set up a server by opening your desktop as a capture device, and switch from Play mode to Stream mode. Run through the wizard that appears, select the destination IP address of your stream, and use port 1234. You can now select the exact compression method you want to package your stream in, from encapsulation to video and audio codecs, by clicking the tool icon. It’s a one-way street, so you can’t take control with VLC itself, but it’s an option.
GAME STREAMING
Games are the gaudy poster child of live streaming, and the topic most associated with the phrase. Given its proliferation, there are plenty of technologies and services associated with transporting gameplay from one place to another. If you’re keeping it to yourself, look in the direction of Steam’s In-Home Streaming service, which, with the minimum of effort, translates titles running on a powerful gaming PC into an h.264 stream, and fires them off to a client machine. As long as it’s running Steam, this client can be equipped with almost any hardware—bringing beautiful games to the wimpiest laptop—though there are caveats to consider on the server end.
You need a machine powerful enough to render your game and quickly compress a video stream at the same time. Your server resolution is the maximum that
is replicated on your client, and that server needs to be actively running the game, so it can’t be used for anything else while you’re streaming. There’s a small amount of lag, naturally, and while it’s technically possible to use VPN trickery to run In-Home Streaming out-of-home, the additional delay makes your games all but unplayable. The same things are generally true for other stream playing experiences, such as Nvidia’s Gamestream, which puts your Ge-Force-accelerated games on to Nvidia Shield devices, and third-party game streamers, such as Parsec and Remotr.
Game streaming comes into its own with one-to-many solutions, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, which take a stream from a client app—OBS is complex but free, XSplit comfortable but subscription-based, and Gameshow the new paid-for pretender— and send it online for anyone to enjoy. Microsoft is, as Microsoft does, sticking its own fingers in the pie, with Mixer (formerly Beam), which has the advantage of being built in to Windows 10 from the Creator’s Update onward, and available from the Game bar, but the disadvantage of being, frankly, not very good. It’ll grow, and it’ll get better, but stick with the big boys for now.
A few technical considerations: While it’s possible to stream to the Internet from the PC you’re playing on, that’s often not the best idea. You’re dealing with, potentially, far greater system overheads than in-home streaming, because you probably also want to process a video stream of your webcam and some sort of flashy overlay. Bigger streamers tend to split the load, with one machine managing the gameplay portion, and another equipped with an HDMI capture device and running the stream end, putting viewer interaction front and center.
PERSONAL STREAMING
While Twitch has long been the home of game streaming, it’s recently taken a turn toward the personal, in the form of Twitch IRL channels. These move the focus away from games and on to the streamer, allowing for personal, often inane, vlogstyle live streaming. Twitch’s terms of service require that these include viewer interaction, follow strict guidelines, and don’t deviate too far from the streamer as
the focus; the service also runs a talk show category, which caters for more subjectfocused content.
YouTube Live, accessible from its Creator Studio, is more flexible in terms of subject matter—you’re free to stream whatever you like, as long as you don’t offend any copyright holders—and includes lots of useful tools. Sign up with your Google account, and you are given a livestreaming permalink that you can share with potential viewers, and (with the help of OBS or similar) you’ll soon be broadcasting. There’s an included DVR feature, which lets viewers who missed the beginning of your broadcast jump back up to four hours. You can also stream directly from your phone, as long as you have an adequate cell connection and data plan.
There’s a number of options for those who desire a more intimate audience. Facebook Live is growing in popularity, and getting up and running is as simple as penning a status, then hitting the live video option. You can, as with any Facebook post, set your privacy to public, and this is certainly a good option if you’re using the broadcast functionality to push your brand, but bear in mind that you’ll need to publicize public events if you want them to reach beyond your timeline. Justin. tv-style livecasting networks still exist, too; Ustream has been swallowed up by IBM, and now aims toward the corporate sector, but YouNow is increasingly popular, though it can lean toward Chatroulette and Omegle territory at times, and that’s not somewhere any civilized person wants to be.
If you want to share a hobby rather than your personality, there are other niche streaming services. Twitch has a Creative category, which permits art, coding, music, and, occasionally, classic Bob Ross and Mr Rogers shows, although you wouldn’t get away with broadcasting these yourself unless you’re the rights holder. Picarto.tv caters specifically to artists, and has a long history and large community behind it. We should also mention Mixlr, which is perfect for audio streamers; you can use it to set up a virtual radio station, or create a live podcast recorded for later. It’s not free—a full subscription with a permanent livestream URL will run you a cool $499 per year—but you can test it out with a trial. Happy streaming!