Idea: OnLive technology between laptop and desktop

Oct 27, 2007
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So the verdict is in on most OnLive reviews and the consensus seems to be, "better than expected". Wouldn't it be cool if someone could develop similar technology to stream between home computers for a lower price?

An example use case: I have a powerful gaming rig, but sometimes it would be nice to play a game on my netbook from the living room. How cool would it be if I could use my desktop to power a game of TF2 while streaming it to my netbook over WiFi? I would totally pay a one-off fee for this to get the power of OnLive with my own equipment and no subscription costs.

:hmm: just thinking out loud. Would anyone else be interested in something like this?
 

Mike Gayner

Diamond Member
Jan 5, 2007
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Presumably it's possible, considering they're able to use the streaming technology over connections far more tenuous than wifi or cat cabling.
 

magomago

Lifer
Sep 28, 2002
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seems dicy. on a game like wow, if you are just casually PVE question, ths would be great if you have an old pc. likewise for any rts that isn't a click fest.


but for virtually most FPS, many RTS, and anything that relies on reaction times.....the delay is just too great right now. But it seems like, for the future, many people would rather go for a system that can stream 1080p video than they would in keeping up with the race to spend more on tech. However, there are a LOT of downsides (I bet you it'll never look as good as running it locally, and it'll obviously never be as responsive because you have to encode the data and send it over the internet in real time) with this; and i would think the show stopper would be the cost of having such an internet line to really bring down the lag to acceptable levels...
 

ImpulsE69

Lifer
Jan 8, 2010
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I agree, however locally...say I wanna sit on the couch in another part of the house and want to use my laptop that can't run a certain game, it might be viable..easy enough to test out. I agree that it might be limited to certain games.
 

gorcorps

aka Brandon
Jul 18, 2004
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Aren't you pretty much describing what VNC does, just smoother? It's really a very old idea/product that just needs some optimization.
 
Oct 27, 2007
17,009
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Aren't you pretty much describing what VNC does, just smoother? It's really a very old idea/product that just needs some optimization.
Yeah that's pretty much what OnLive is too, but the fact that they can stream full games with acceptable levels of lag is not trivial.
 

PingSpike

Lifer
Feb 25, 2004
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Isn't latency on LAN connections less than 1ms most of the time. You'd probably be approaching unnoticeable.