EDIT: Oops, misread, the OSS client is called moonlight: https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-android
In which case, perhaps a better replacement is something like this: https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-android
Moonlight is the client :)
I'm not sure if Steam Link (software) supports 120 Hz or HDR, but I haven't found any hardware decoder that does. Steam Link (hardware) is also defunct.
Also, Apple's decode engine struggles with 4K60. The right answer is likely a full-on mini-PC, but it feels like a sledgehammer for a fly.
I saw a reddit post saying the HDR gets washed out by the Steam Link software and it should be disabled.
Moonlight genuinely works for me with HDR so I've never had reason to test the Steam Link software for myself.
I would think that would open them up to class action.
Moonlight still exists for the time being.
I have a working alternative to Gamestream - both Server and Client, written in C++ - lying around here. It's just that I could never figure out how to monetize it, so now I'm just using it for me and my friends.
But when testing it, I noticed that quite a lot of competitive games will consider it "cheating" if you try to grab the screen in real-time. I presume that's to avoid AI-based aimbots who would actually just recognize the enemy based on the picture.
Also, some games outright forbid using game streaming services in their EULA, which is how pretty much everything by Blizzard & Activision got booted off Geforce NOW.
And if you think about it, it does make financial sense for them to forbid streaming. As-is, I am sharing one purchased copy of the game with my friends. We have one cheap GPU server with Hetzner and we take turns playing the games. Or we play a couch-coop game online with multiple Gamepads connected to that one server. If you prevent this form of sharing, each of us would have needed to purchase a copy of the game to install locally, so the publisher is potentially losing money by tolerating game streaming.
You can essentially do all of this with Steam anyway. You can use the Steam Family Sharing to share your video games like that if you're playing at different times. And you can use Let's Play Together to all remote to the same computer and play split screen.
How do you know that the same game starting twice on the same cloud IP is the same user, and not the provider of that cloud service underpaying you?
With Steam Link I keep having to change the capture method for Steam and the screen mode for the game (borderless/full screen) for different games, or the screen will be the wrong format, or show some black bars. Never had this issue with Gamestream, so that's what I always use.
After they take away this and since Plex in Server mode is mostly unusable, I don't see the point of using the Shield. Any other android box will do the simple tasks Shield still does.
(Clarifying the issue with Plex server: The Shield is great for low power and very efficient transcoding, but connection to SMB storage is broken for years. It's silly that NVIDIA doesn't fix anything, and the NVIDIA Shield official forums are absolutely full of excuses from NVIDIA devs. Meaning Plex Server is unusable unless you are connecting the Shield directly to an external USB drive).
I know that the Nvidia Shield TV Pro is a flagship product and highly recommended in home media server circles. It's not hard to imagine Nvidia shifting their focus to that product and sunsetting a feature that doesn't overlap a lot with that crowd.
Nvidia Shield TV Pro is one of the only devices I know of that can play back Dolby Vision files properly, at least via Plex/Kodi. The specific DV profiles supported is a work in progress but the most common webrips are detected properly and enable Dolby Vision mode on the TV. BD Rips aren't completely supported by any device other than disk players, but non DV fallback usually works fine. Chinese TV boxes have unofficial DV support but certain surround codec support can be spotty and support could mean simply discarding the metadata. Kodi added support recently on android builds but DV needs hardware level support as well for true playback.
There's an open source implementation of the Gamestream called Sunshine that does pretty well, but it's got a few kinks still (no HDR support).
