Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

This is pretty cool (for managing servers cheaply), but I remain disappointed that remotely controlling computers over a network with low latency is still a difficult task. I've been trying to find a way to use a bunch of machines remotely over my LAN (for gaming / media playback on multiple devices), and have been somewhat disappointed at the quality / latency of the various options I've played around with. It's especially disappointing when you have 10gbps networking, and sending uncompressed 1080p60 video over over the network with a couple ms of latency should be trivial, from a bandwidth perspective. Obviously this is a different problem than what you're trying to solve (remote management, so you have to do HDMI + USB stuff in hardware, adding some latency), but it's still annoying that there aren't great lower latency software options.

Steam link does it, and fast enough to play games with no noticeable latency.

Not sure what the magic is, though.

SPICE (virt-viewer) performs well enough for my every day web browsing with VMs. The performance is annoying but adequate over wifi/WAN.

I haven't tried Steam Link yet, but I might give it a shot. I was originally looking for purely remote desktop stuff for a combination of managing computers and gaming, so I was mostly testing stuff not specifically marketed to gamers. Ideally I'd also like something that does software<->hardware (at higher latency obviously), so I can stream older computers or game consoles to a variety of devices as well.

I did end up trying Parsec, since I saw some people recommending it, and that was terrible. Latency was fine (~10ms software <-> software) and video quality was alright, but audio quality was terrible despite being set to the highest option - which is especially bad, because there's no option to send uncompressed audio, and whatever "optimization work" they were doing to reduce bandwidth made their entire product unusable, despite the fact that there's no need to try saving 1mbps over a wired LAN.

I'm curious how well this works over a LAN - over a WAN, my expectations are way lower because of actual limitations from going over the internet, so I'm fine with some latency / quality loss.

the latency is absolutely noticeable, the human brain adapts quite well though. i've switched mid-playthrough of ori and the blind forest (highly recommended btw) from a link to native 144hz and was blown away how easy the game has become :)

the point still stands: most games are very playable via a steam link.

Sorry, I was trying to imply that it does work great over a wired LAN. I run my everyday browsers on a separate physical machine, communicating over gigabit ethernet. Videos with sound generally play fine, although I often youtube-dl longer ones for usability's sake. The main source of flakiness I've had is from opening too many tabs in low-memory VMs.

Have you tried out https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-qt ?

If all your host machines are Windows 8+, then Parsec is fantastic and has clients for every major OS other than iOS.

I looked into Moonlight, but don't have any nVidia cards laying around here to test with.

I tried Parsec on one machine and was super disappointed. Video quality and latency were fine, but audio sounded like crap, despite streaming at 512kbps. Since there's no option to stream uncompressed audio, and no debug options to figure out why it sounded so terrible, I had to write off their entire product as unusable.

the cool thing about this solution seems also, that it conveniently alleviates the "need a screen"-problem of the windows-screencapture-approach.