Bigscreen Streaming UPDATE: Dedicated servers, improved Remote Desktop and more!
Bigscreen Beta · published
Over the past 2 years, we poured our soul into rewriting our core technologies from scratch. Bigscreen now has massively improved screens and higher quality streaming. Here's the full patch notes, hope you enjoy it!
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New Dedicated Streaming Servers
Bigscreen lets you host a room and stream your Windows PC desktop screen. We're hosting new Dedicated Servers that massively improved video streaming quality with perfectly synced audio. Dedicated Servers also reduce the bandwidth requirements for room hosts. Before this update, user-hosted rooms in Bigscreen would sometimes have choppy video, with lots of blocky, low-quality video artifacts. The audio was sometimes delayed and laggy.
This update solves those issues and dramatically improves the experience for watching movies and YouTube or playing PC videogames with friends. Our new server infrastructure also allows users to host much larger rooms, now supporting up to 15 people per room.
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Remote Desktop improvements
The new Bigscreen Remote Desktop app makes it much easier to host a room on your Quest and stream your Windows PC desktop with ultra-low latency streams and improved video & audio quality. When the Oculus Quest launched, Bigscreen had a basic Remote Desktop feature, but it was very difficult to stream and play PC videogames on your Quest. The 30fps video stream could be laggy and low quality, and audio could be out of sync.
Our new technology solves those issues! The latency when using your PC from Quest can be as low as sub-20ms, with up to 100Mbps bitrate streams. The new Remote Desktop also streams at 60fps over your LAN. It no longer feels like watching a video, it now feels like a virtual monitor in your Quest.
Remote Desktop works great in singleplayer on your Quest using your PC by yourself. But the most important aspect that sets Bigscreen Remote Desktop apart is that it also works socially! Invite your friends into a Bigscreen room on your Quest, run Bigscreen Remote Desktop on your PC. and your friends will instantly see your monitor. This lets you do anything on your PC, with your friends, like watching movies, browsing the web, or playing videogames.
You can download the new Bigscreen Remote Desktop installer from our website.
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Also...
We implemented Spatial Audio for voice chat, greatly increasing the sense of "presence" and helping you intuitively understand who is talking in a virtual room.
We improved VR rendering performance especially for Quest 1 users. Before it was hard to hit framerate on Quest 1 with more than 8 users in a room. Now, Bigscreen can easily handle 15 users in a room even on Quest 1.
PC and Quest users can now host bigger rooms up to 15 people per room
Significant bug fixes and UI improvements.
What's next?
The Streaming Update's infrastructure has laid a lot of groundwork for future updates in the coming weeks and months. Here's a small teaser on what's to come:
- Friend System
- Input streaming for Remote Desktop, including support for Bluetooth gamepads and keyboards.
- Built-in Youtube app that lets you browse and watch YouTube with friends
Bigscreen is fully cross-platform, so you can download it from the Oculus Store or Steam for free, and it supports major headsets like Oculus Quest, Valve Index, all Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and all SteamVR headsets.
If you have issues, feel free to message or ask for help in the Discord
If you like Bigscreen please leave a review on the store! It makes a huge difference and supports us 🔥