Play games locally in your web browser using this free tool

Shawn Knight

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Staff member

Notebooks afford us the luxury of surfing the web or playing games virtually anywhere. Unless you’re prepared to shell out the big bucks necessary for a gaming-grade notebook, however, you can pretty much rule out the possibility of playing modern titles at anything close to decent quality.

A new tool from app developer Dominic Szablewski looks to provide a viable workaround. Best yet, it won’t cost you a single cent.

Szablewski, creator of Instant Webcam, said he was inspired to build the app after seeing Larry Gadea use Amazon EC2 and Steam In-Home Streaming to create a personal cloud gaming platform.

His tool, jsmpeg-vnc, is a lightweight Windows application written in C. It captures the screen at 60 FPS, encodes it into MPEG1, sends it to a browser on another device across your local network which is then decoded in JavaScript using jsmpeg. Inputs (like a keyboard and mouse) are beamed back to the host system with minimal lag, essentially creating a platform that’s very similar to Nvidia’s GameStream technology.

Szablewski admitted the app works much better than it should.

Using his system as a test bed, Szablewski said latency typically hovers around 50ms to 70ms. On an 800 x 600 resolution stream, CPU utilization on his Core i5 checked in at around seven percent.

If you want to give it a try, the full source code and binary releases are available to download on GitHub.

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This is great news! Now you no longer have to be content with running your yap on the phone while you drive down the expressway, you can play games as well!

Does anybody have a Sherman Tank they'd like to trade for a motorcycle. I guess it's either that, or I better keep to the side streets.
 
I am pretty sure you get low latency when you are on the local WiFi dude. You can't play remote from a car while driving streaming from your personal pc.

Anyway, this is no great shakes. Why doesn't he use RDP instead of VNC?!? it's a Windows app that requires an insecure vnc server. DO NOT LIKE.
 
RDP is a protocol specifically for terminal services. The desktop environment is generated inside an isolated session manager. High-end visuals are only possible using RemoteFX, a recent and complicated addition to the protocol.

VNC is a direct frame buffer capture protocol.

If you are worried about security you could download the source code, and add encryption to the mix. I'm sure it will add latency as well.

Finally, this is very much a LAN dependent setup due to latency. If you are worried about people packet sniffing your LAN game data then pardon me while I chortle at your tin foil hat.
 
Hmm, it seems that full screen games don't work - I've had similar problems with Splashtop, Limelight however works rather well. Also, I didn't have sound...
 
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