Attention gamers! Here’s a lightweight solution for streaming PC games

If you’re a gamer then you must have faced this dilemma where the game you wanted to play is too heavy for your weak PC and your parents won’t allow you to upgrade until you show them some good grades. Fear not, for a solution is here – and it does not require any beefy hardware! The developer of an app called Instant Webcam has adapted its underlying tools to make it possible to stream a game to any web browser.

The program is called jsmpeg-vnc, and it’s available for free and it’s open source! This is a small Windows utility written in C that captures the screen at 60fps and encodes it into an MPEG1 video stream. Then you just need to use the browser on another device on your network, like a laptop or phone, to connect to the stream over WebSockets. The machine receiving the stream only needs to be powerful enough to decode the stream in JavaScript (using jsmpeg).

This program also takes your mouse and keyboard inputs from the receiving device and sends them back over the network to the remote machine. Thus, you can use your desktop PC and play desktop games in your browser with minimal lag. The only thing you have to worry about is network congestion. But since this is a local network, congestion control shouldn’t be a problem.

This game streaming technology is pretty much like Nvidia GameStream, the only difference being that this solution does not provide any compensation for network conditions. Jsmpeg-vnc works on any device. The source code is available on Github. Go try it now and let us know what you think about it in the comments section below.

Via Geek