Nice to see Stadia had some long term benefit. It’s a shame they don’t make a self hosted version but if you did that it’s just piracy in today’s drm world.
Probably wouldn’t have been feasible - I heard developers had to compile their games with Stadia support. Maybe it was an entirely different platform, with its own alternative to DirectX, or maybe had some kind of lightweight emulation (such as Proton) but I remember vaguely the few games I played had custom stadia key bindings (with stadia symbols). They would display like that within the game. So definitely some customization did happen.
This is unlike the model that PlayStation, Xbox and even Nvidia are following - I don’t know about Amazon Luna.
Stadia games were just run on Linux with Vulkan + some extra Stadia APIs for their custom swapchain and other bits and pieces. Stadia games were basically just Linux builds.
As I understand it, GeForce Now actually does require changes to the game to run in the standard and until recently only option of "Ready To Play". This is the supposed reason that new updates to games sometimes take time to get released on the service, since either the developers themselves or Nvidia needs to modify it to work correctly on the service. I have no idea if this is true, but it makes sense to me.
They recently added "Install to Play" where you can install games from Steam that aren't modified for the service. They charge for storage for this though.
Sadly, there's still tons of games unavaiable because publishers need to opt in and many don't.
They did have a dev console based on a Lenovo workstation, as well as off-menu AMD V340L 2x8GB GPUs, both later leaked into Internet auctions. So some hardware and software customizations had definitely happened.
It's a shame that virtual / headless displays are such a mess on both Linux and Windows. I use a 32:9 ultrawide and stream to 16:9/16:10 devices, and even with hours of messing around with an HDMI dummy and kscreen-doctor[1] it was still an unreliable mess. Sometimes it wouldn't work when the machine was locked, and sometimes Sunshine wouldn't restore the resolution on the physical monitor (and there's no session timeout either).
Artemis is a bit better, but it still requires per-device setup of displays since it somehow doesn't disable the physical output next to the virtual one. Those drivers also add latency to the capture (the author of looking glass really dislikes them because they undo all the hard work of near-zero latency).
On Linux with an AMD i/dGPU, you can set the `virtual_display` module parameter for `amdgpu`[1] and do what you want without the need for an HDMI dummy or weird software. It's also hardware accelerated.
> virtual_display (charp)
> Set to enable virtual display feature. This feature provides a virtual display hardware on headless boards or in virtualized environments. It will be set like xxxx:xx:xx.x,x;xxxx:xx:xx.x,x. It’s the pci address of the device, plus the number of crtcs to expose. E.g., 0000:26:00.0,4 would enable 4 virtual crtcs on the pci device at 26:00.0. The default is NULL.
> Built-in Virtual Display with HDR support that matches the resolution/framerate config of your client automatically
It includes a virtual screen driver, and it handles all the crap (it can disable your physical screen when streaming and re enable after, it can generate the virtual screen by client to match the client's needs, or do it by game, or ...)
I stream from my main pc to both my laptop and my steamdeck, and each get the screen that matches them without having to do anything more than connect to it with moonlight.
Artemis/Apollo are mentioned in the post above - yeah they work better than the out of box experience, but you still have to configure your physical screen to be off for every virtual display. It unfortunately only runs on Windows and my machine usually doesn't. I also only have one dGPU and a Raphael iGPU (which are sensitive to memory overclocks) and I like the Linux gaming experience for the most part, so while I did have a working gaming VM, it wasn't for me (or I'd want another GPU).
I don't understand, "self hosted stadia" is just one of the myriad of services and tools that do literally that.
Steam has game streaming built in and works very well. Both Nvidia and AMD built this into their GPU drivers at one point or another (I think the AMD one was shut down?)
Those are just the solutions I accidentally have installed despite not using that functionality. You can even stream games from the steam deck!
Sony even has a system to let you stream your PS4 to your computer anywhere and play it. I think Microsoft built something similar for Xbox.
Stadia was sadly engineered in such a way that this is impossible.
Speaking of which, who thought up the idea to use custom hardware for this that would _already be obsolete_ a year later? Who considered using Linux native instead of a compat layer? Why did the original Stadia website not even have a search bar??
Why not something like Bandcamp, or other DRM-free purchase options?
I'm not above piracy if there's no DRM free option (or if the music is very old or the artist is long dead), but I still believe in supporting artists who actively support freedom.
That sounds pretty good! I'll buy an album. I know nothing about Bluegrass, but I love that it has fostered a culture of digital freedom. It kind of makes sense I suppose, given that DRM freedom aligns with real traditional American values.
Bluegrass is a highly technical, musically complex, urban form of Appalachian country music. It is distinct for sharing the rhythm among stringed instruments (stemming from the constraint that the trip down from the mountains into the cities - usually conducted by freight trains and pickup trucks - did not afford the transport of a drum kit).
At its core is a corpus of traditional songs which have been handed down across generations, especially Irish fiddle tunes and West African banjo music.
The concepts of digital freedom trace multiple clear lineages to this tradition of music. For example, John Perry Barlow, who founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Freedom of The Press Foundation, and participated heavily in discussions on The WELL which laid the cryptological groundwork that eventually became blockchains, was a member of The Grateful Dead (who, while more of a rock or country band than a traditional string band, stewarded and celebrated this corpus of music across several decades) and was himself an aficionado of the history of IP-unencumbered music.
If you see the word "Traditional" on a bluegrass setlist (usually listed next to a song where an author normally goes), it effectively means "I assert that this song is not subject to intellectual property."
Fascinating. Thanks for the information. I'll have to explore the Bluegrass space more. It's a genre that I have never given much thought or time to in the past; I was simply never exposed, other than the slim association with some folk punk acts.
I was doing that for a while, and running a seedbox. However, on occasions when the seedbox was the only seeder, clients were unable to begin the download, for reasons I've never figured out. If I also seeded from my desktop, then fan downloads were being fed by both the desktop and the seedbox. But without the desktop, the seedbox did nothing.
I need to revisit this in the next few weeks as I release my second record (which, if I may boast, has an incredible ensemble of most of my favorite bluegrass musicians on it; it was a really fun few days at the studio).
Currently I do pin all new content to IPFS and put the hashes in the content description, as with this video of Drowsy Maggie with David Grier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTI1HoFYbE0
Another note: our study of Drowsy Maggie was largely made possible by finding old-and-nearly-forgotten versions in the Great78 project, which of course the industry attempted to sue out of existence on an IP basis. This is another example of how IP is a conceptual threat to traditional music - we need to be able to hear the tradition in order to honor it.
