Hey everyone!
It's been 3 months since we launched BigScreen on Steam Today, we're sooo excited to finally launch Desktop Audio Streaming
What is BigScreen?
First, some background. BigScreen lets you use your Windows desktop in VR. You can use any of your favorite apps and do anything you do on your computer, but on massive screens in amazing virtual worlds. You can use BigScreen entirely by yourself (singleplayer) or in public/private rooms with up to 4 people (multiplayer). In multiplayer, we had microphone audio streaming and desktop streaming (aka screensharing). This lets you play games together, work together, browse reddit together, or just hangout.
Desktop Audio Streaming
And now, with the desktop audio streaming, you can hangout in a BigScreen room and hear any sounds on your friend's desktop. A friend thousands of miles away could pull up a video and you could actually watch it together. Sound from your friend's computer is played on your computer and it's non-positional/spatial, so that video will sound exactly the same as if you played it on your own computer.
We've solved some hard technical problems like echo and sync. Our network architecture is peer-to-peer (and encrypted), so none of your desktop data goes through our servers. This also means the audio should be high quality and low latency.
HOW TO
If you want to listen to someone's desktop sounds, you don't need to do anything. It Just Works.
But if you want to stream your desktop audio, you need the BigScreen Alpha and Voicemeeter
- Right click on BigScreen Beta in Steam > Properties > Betas and select 'alpha' in the dropdown. BigScreen Alpha and Beta are compatible, so your friends can be on the Beta, while you create a room and stream desktop audio using the Alpha.
- You need to install Voicemeeter Banana. This lets us route BigScreen sounds and desktop sounds separately to avoid echo problems. We're working on simplifying this process and integrating a virtual audio driver natively into BigScreen. BigScreen will automatically open and configure Voicemeeter when you press "on" in the Create Room page. You don't have to do any configuring, just install Voicemeeter and BigScreen will do the rest.
Notes
Only the room creator can stream their desktop sounds
Only the person that ]created the room can stream their desktop sounds to people in the room. This was an intentional design decision, so random people don't jump into your public room and ruin your experience with loud/bad audio.
480p for better fps
We recommend 480p for better 30fps streaming and video+audio sync. We still have some framerate issues with 1080p. This will be fixed in the next major architecture upgrade in ~1 month. You can expect flawless 1080p at 30fps then! You can change your desktop stream resolution in Settings > Multiplayer. This does not affect the resolution of your own screen in front of you. That's always the resolution and refresh rate of your physical monitor.
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Following up on last week's update, our new architecture is stable! No more random disconnects, server crashes, people with black/gray screens, or muted audio problems. If you had problems before, try again! It should work!
Enjoy!