Best way to remotely watch someone play, in your experience

jamail77

New member
May 21, 2011
683
0
0
So, I've known about TeamViewer for quite a while now. A friend of mine recently got Batman: Arkham City off Steam and wanted me to watch him play. I reinstalled TeamViewer and tried to watch him play. Then, pretty bad lag kicked in. I expected it and tried to set the streaming to optimize speed over quality. While it improved it wasn't significant enough to appreciate the gameplay.

For those who use TeamViewer what else can I do to improve the viewing experience? For everyone else, what is the better alternative? I know TeamViewer's main purpose is to allow remote control, not remote viewing, but I feel like it's one of the more well known options for this sort of stuff. I really don't know of much other software; I know they exist, but they aren't promoted enough in my circles unfortunately. Does TeamViewer overshadow the better options?
 

SmugFrog

Ribbit
Sep 4, 2008
1,239
4
43
I've never used Teamviewer, but I've been watching a friend play through Half-Life 2 over twitch. Seems to work out pretty well, occasionally I have lag that I can't determine is from my bad internet connection or twitch. The only downside to it is the delay in broadcast, so when I try to send him a message because he's lost, or to look at something, he's already moved from that part.
 
Apr 5, 2008
3,736
0
0
The issue with games is that it's a *lot* of video data that is updated 60 times a second or more. A powerful graphics card processes all this data and outputs it to a monitor over DVI, HDMI or VGA without issue; those leads are designed for high bandwidth (DVI f.ex is up to just under 5Gb/s). Trying to stream a game over an Internet connection will result in a choppy framerate (possibly lower than 1fps) and poor colour representation.

Your friend would need to take the lead on this and use a streaming service like Twitch or such like. They run a "client" on their PC which captures the images from the graphics card, compresses and uploads them, all in real-time (or close enough). The reason this can work where team viewer cannot is the capture and compression of the data before it's uploaded. It reduces the amount of data that has to be transferred (in a similar way to JPG images vs RAW). It also puts the onus of processing the data on your friend's computer.

I'm not sure precisely what options will be available, but as a general example, the game as it's currently being played by your friend might be in a higher resolution (1366x768, 1280x960, 1920x1080, etc), 60 FPS with high/max settings. Twitch will reduce the frame rate, could if desired lower the resolution as well and compress those fewer frames it does upload.

You could, with your current setup, try one thing before experimenting further, though I'm quite sure the results will be the same. Your friend could lower the resolution of the game and put all GFX settings on low, turning off any AA, AF, DoF, SSAO, etc. The frame rate may improve (albeit at the cost of image quality) though whether it's enough to make it watchable over Teamviewer is another question. Could be worth trying.
 

jamail77

New member
May 21, 2011
683
0
0
SmugFrog said:
I've never used Teamviewer, but I've been watching a friend play through Half-Life 2 over twitch. Seems to work out pretty well, occasionally I have lag that I can't determine is from my bad internet connection or twitch.
I actually have heard of Twitch, which makes me realize I should have clarified that I am referring to things that establish a remote connection between just the two computers, not something that just streams the footage online.
Batou667 said:
Best way to remotely watch someone play, in your experience
In person. Through their bedroom window. Grinning evilly
. Ha, you clever trolling devil, you. I guess that does count as remote viewing
 

jamail77

New member
May 21, 2011
683
0
0
KingsGambit said:
Your friend would need to take the lead on this
Oh, boy, this isn't what I was hoping for.
KingsGambit said:
and use a streaming service like Twitch or such like. They run a "client" on their PC which captures the images from the graphics card, compresses and uploads them, all in real-time (or close enough). The reason this can work where team viewer cannot is the capture and compression of the data before it's uploaded. It reduces the amount of data that has to be transferred (in a similar way to JPG images vs RAW). It also puts the onus of processing the data on your friend's computer.

[snip]The frame rate may improve (albeit at the cost of image quality) though whether it's enough to make it watchable over Teamviewer is another question. Could be worth trying.
As you can tell from my responses to previous posts, I was aware of things like Twitch and was hoping for a solution that still allows me to use TeamViewer or something like TeamViewer, so I can just keep the remote connection between my computer and my friend's rather than full on online streaming. I can't help tooting my own horn here, so I can say that I actually knew a decent bit about what you were talking about (My major is Computer Science. It leads to me to getting asked for more "computer help" than I should, so there's a lot of stuff I don't know, whether it's hardware or the details of matters outside of strict programming. After dealing with annoying requests, it feels good to know I've gained some knowledge from it all I guess, enough to already know more or less what you're talking about if not a few details you keyed me into :D )

Anyway, my friend's skills and patience with this stuff are pretty dodgy. It was painful enough for him to hear me walk him through installing TeamViewer. I highly doubt it'll be easy to convince him to take more initiative especially since he'll assume this probably means we'll be trying lots of options, meaning a lot more processes to walk him through. I'll try of course, that is, if getting TeamViewer to do it better doesn't work out, as it would be completely unfair to everyone's suggestions and the discussion to derail just because my friend wants things simple (and really it's already simple, it's just how basic he is with it all).

Can you answer one of my OP unanswered questions and tell me if TeamViewer overshadows other programs when it comes to JUST remote connections/control between two computers? I'm still curious about that since I don't much about the other options in that type of connecting.