It’s a perfect analogy as the CD market was decimated by MP3 piracy/iTunes well before streaming became ubiquitous. Once the quality was deemed acceptable the convenience became paramount. This didn’t happen back when digital music was compressed using terrible RealAudio codecs.
And sure you can, by ripping lossless, or even using max bitrate MP3 encodes (which is what I use to do).
Stream FLAC from where? Spotify, Pandora, etc. don’t support FLAC.
And I suppose technically you could also stream games off your own personal media/games server and achieve whatever quality level you wanted (except for latency).
I meant, from a technical perspective, you could do it. I think Tidal has a premium option for FLAC (well, I don’t know if it’s exactly it’s flac, they call it lossless hifi or master audio)
Are there a lot of record labels on Tidal?
Looks like invites are going out on waves; I finally got one last night. Aside from some wonkiness with DS4Windows and a couple moments of video degradation this plays way better than expected. It still felt “off” enough that I could tell I wasn’t playing a local copy, but there was minimal input lag.
Best way I’ve seen this technology described is that it feels like you’re playing a video game on a YouTube channel. You will notice compression artifacts typical of video.
This played almost flawlessly for me last night. Teeny bit of input lag, but nothing too bothersome for a 3rd-person actiion game. Still pretty impressive tech.
Got the email to partake in this thing but I balls’d up the registration.
Got to the bit where it tests your connection speed, it couldn’t connect and kept telling me to try again so after a few tries I decided to leave it as I had to bring my dog to the vet. Figured the servers were getting hammered or something and I’d just do it later. This was a mistake. Now it says the code I’m using is already in use blah blah
Just a heads up if you get into this thing, stay the course!!!
I guess a little? I don’t usually notice compression artifacts on YouTube, so ymmv. I got my beta invite yesterday and it looks pretty great. (I’ll try to take some screens this evening.) I was an early adopter for OnLive and input lag was always the main issue there. Even my SteamBox has lag that makes action games pretty unfun to play. This is somehow flawless. I forgot I was playing through a browser and closed my browser without thinking. Timing on fight scenes seems just as responsive as anything else. The controller just works. The mouse just works. This is about as good as it gets.
Can you save your progress, i.e. can you legitimately play Ass Creed: Odyssey this way?
I got in yesterday as well. For the most part the game looked good and played well, but I did experience jags of bad compression and video breakup 4 or 5 times as I played. This was over wifi on my laptop, but with a good AC 5Ghz connection in the same room as my router. I believe some of the problems were related to Windows 10 having just updated and trying to silently install drivers and junk in the background. I was playing during peak internet traffic hours as well so I suspect general internet congestion contributed as well.
Yes.
Jesus, the service would be kind of a bust if you couldn’t!
I know but I was just asking in relation to the beta, might be an easy way to play the game for me if i get an invite.
I got the game working over Steam Link. Just need to pair my XB1 controller with the PC rather than the Steam Link box. Video looked decent on my OLED TV, audio came through my Denon receiver just fine. Need to determine if lag will be an issue, considering I’m streaming the game twice.
It’s a lot of work just to play this game though. This was more of a nerdy “will this work?” exercise.
yeah, it does. I assume it’s similar to Steam cloud saves. Also the beta comes with $10 to spend on microtransactions!
I’m going to try to play the whole game this way. The beta is good until Jan 15th, so why not?
I’m blown away at how good this is. So much better than even Steam Link or OnLive.
I suspect that they are using Google’s VP9 video codec rather than the h.264 most other services have relied on which may give them certain advantages in quality and compression speed. Will be interesting to see a more detailed write-up on their approach. I’m super curious to know more about things like how the game files are stored server side. Is the whole game kept in a RAM disk on a shared file server? Games aren’t yet designed to take advantage of some of the crazy things you could try in a server setting that would never work on consumer level hardware.
Screenshot. This is from my desktop. I get similar, but not quite as good quality from my $150 Chromebook. (I suspect the connection strength is the main factor there.)
Yeah, should be pretty much the same, it’s just decoding video.
I have to chuckle about how amazing this seems. No $300 PS4? No $800 PC? Just a Chromebook? Very cool. I suppose you could use Chromecast and play it on a TV?
Now we just have to wait and see what this will cost and what the game selection will be like.
