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[dumb question] gaming pc in a server rack. playable from anywhere in the house?
TLDR:
can i make a centralized gaming computer accessable from anywhere in my house?
so i have a thought but dont know if its possible and def not sure if its possible to do within a budget thats not unreasonable. but figured this would be a good place to ask the question.
my house is wired for ethernet(only cat5e no fiber or anything. but i plan to change that eventually over time)
my thought is i have guests occasionally that game such as a few buddies that visit from another state and like to game with me. as well as my sister and mother live in my house and sisters boyfriend games. i was wanting to setup a server for the house. ex navy and used to take movies and tv shows with me since not always able to access streaming services and such. and wanted to put those all onto a server that allows me to stream to anywhere in my house. as well as provide a place to congregate data as we all have little creative projects(inkscape, streaming games, 3d printing, you name it just a bunch of things) so being able to save files centrally would be great. as well as being able to save, and access data remotely(outside the house) would be a great thing. so been wanting to make my own homelad,NAS server,media server, so on. but thought about starting by getting a rack and putting a gaming rig in it. then expanding from there.
my overall question is. can i make it so either using docks. or ethernet/fiber, or adding ports to my house such as a media port (hdmi/displayport, with audio and usb-c/a) panel to each room would it be possible to make it accessible from anywhere in the house?
i also contemplated utilizing a virtual machine setup but not sure thats great since i remember managing one a while back and it was a giant pain.
ill check back but not expecting this to really be possible but any inputs welcome.
Comments Section
Sunshine (server) and moonlight (client) do great for this. You may need a dummy plug to trick windows into thinking you have a monitor attached.
I use this in our place to play games when I'm away from my desktop. Not sure about latency for FPS games but it great for more strategy stuff that I'm into.
No dummy plug needed, there's an headless driver that resolves that. Also supports HDR in win11.
Have shared gaming PC set up like this for tv room and kids to use. Sunshine and Moonlight app for laptops/android tv, phone, what ever needed. Even Oculus over Air Link works with it.
With Steam Family sharing now I can have a family shared steam account set up on the PC and still play other games on my main machine when the kids want to play something.
you can get some kind of hdmi-over-fiber adaptor IIRC.
I play cities skylines 2 over remote desktop and Im perfectly happy with it but last time I said that on here I got the impression that people think im stupid
its funny i accidentally bought a 8 display repeater(thought it was the opposite) a long while back. and if i did this with that then it would be able to repeat the display to more then every room in my house lol. so this might actually make that item i never returned useful.
Linus tech tips has done this.
watching now
Steam link. The software one. Just install steam everywhere. Then when you click at the game you can chose to "stream" instead of "play". Works pretty well. One time I even had raspberry pi connected to the TV + steam link app on raspberry. Over 1Gb ethernet link it was comfortable.
Craft computing on YouTube has done some remote gaming servers that may fit your use case. Fibre HDMI and USB over Ethernet are probably the most reliable