wolf VS encoder-benchmark

Referenced in one of the dockerfiles: https://games-on-whales.github.io/gow/overview.html is certainly the more reasonable approach to streaming games off docker/kubernetes.

Their sunlight alternative https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf adding multiple tenants is neat as well. Definitely going to give it a spin on some intel iGpu nodes.

I discovered the moonlight client and sunshine server a few months ago. These are open source solutions to provide remote gaming/desktop capabilities with built in input and audio passthrough. I tried NoMachine, but I wasn't able to get audio to work. This looks like a known issue on arch. On sunshine, I didn't have to do any extra tweaking! This allowed me to game on my desktop pc without having to sit at my desk. This was especially helpful while watching my 2nd son. I was really impressed by the performance, I could stream my host's display at high resolutions and frame rates with low latency despite my desktop being in the basement using WiFi. I was getting some instability with WiFi, so I wanted to try connecting my desktop to the router via Ethernet. I decided to go with a headless solution because that gives me more flexibility on the placement of the desktop; I ended up moving my desktop upstairs closer to my router. I figured out a way to stream my hosts display headless by using Nvidia TwinView to create the virtual display. This means I don't need to buy any HDMI/DP dummy plugs. I wrote a Linux Guide for sunshine on how to set this up. If you have any feedback on this guide, let me know! I haven't tried this, but wolf is an interesting docker alternative to sunshine.

Along similar but far more experimental lines, you can also take a look at: https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf

It's still rough around the edges, and it needs more testing from the community; if you want to check it out, here you can find the docs and here's the Github repo.

Long-term, I'm looking to switch away from windows and sunshine (the code base is shit and the current maintainer does not know c++) and instead move into a dockerized environment where I "spawn" the game. Someone's working on my vision called wolf, though I've personally been hacking away at a rust-based version similar to ALVR as a learning exercise. I'm a huge fan of centralized computing and my goal is to make sure all my tech is in one room out of site.

The sunshine project also got me curious in video encoding. I wanted to learn more about how to benchmark encoder performance and I discovered the encoder-benchmark. I noticed a small issue on linux that prevented the calculation of VMAF scores. Fortunately it was a simple fix. The filetime method didnt work on Linux, so I replaced the method with a cross platform one. I wasn't familiar with rust, so the concept of ownership confused me at first. I also noticed ffmpeg would hang forever when it times out. I added retry logic and timeout detection to ensure the permutor-cli runs to completion. Since there was no official linux support, I decided to contribute to the Arch User Reposititory (AUR). I have published a git and non-git version. The git version pulls the latest from main at the time of building. The not-git version pulls the current git tag.

I have a tool I've developed to help make this research process a lot more automated: https://github.com/Proryanator/encoder-benchmark just added support for Intel AV1, with Nvidia on the way soon.

https://github.com/Proryanator/encoder-benchmark/releases/tag/v0.5.2-alpha this version has logic to catch whether your local networking stuff for collecting stats hangs and should fail now.