[dropcap size=small]B[/dropcap]eing a gamer, there must have come a time when you wanted to play a game but because of not having the right hardware, you weren’t able to. Getting your hardware upgraded is always an option, but for that you’d need to spend a lot of money. What if there was an alternative to this? What if one could even play the heaviest of the games like GTA V without having a beefy hardware?
Well, you don’t ned to wonder about it anymore; a developer named Dominic Szablewski has come up with [highlight ]an application which will let you stream games to any modern web browser, be it on your laptop or smartphone.[/highlight] Szablewski, who also developed Instant Webcam was inspired by Larry Land’s post on creating personal cloud gaming platform (with the use of Amazon EC2 and Steam’s In-Home Streaming) to make this application.
The program is named jsmpeg-vnc. [highlight ]It is an open-source and can be downloaded for free.[/highlight] It is a tiny Windows program and is written in C. So, how exactly does it work? Well, jsmpeg-vnc captures your screen at 60 fps and then encodes it into an MPEG1 video which can be then streamed on to your laptop, Android device, or even an iOS device (needs to be decent enough to decode the stream in JavaScript). All you need to do is to use the browser on your receiving device, so that you can connect it to the stream over WebSockets.
[highlight ]The program will also take the mouse and keyboard inputs from the receiving device and will send them back over the network to the remote machine. This will let you play games on your browser with the least lags possible.[/highlight] Even Szablewski himself has stated that the application works way better than it should.
Below is a video which shows the developer playing GTA V at 648 x 480 on his iPhone’s browser:
The binaries and source codes can be downloaded from GitHub, if you want to try out the application.
