Play GTA V In Your Browser – Sort Of

Inspired by a blog post to run your own cloud gaming service which uses a VPN and Steam's In-Home Streaming, I thought I could do this, too, but in the browser.

With the tech I developed for Instant Webcam I had all the major building blocks ready and just needed to glue them together in nice, useable Windows App.

The result is jsmpeg-vnc – a tiny Windows application written in C. It captures the screen at 60 frames per second, encodes it into MPEG1 using FFmpeg, sends it over WebSockets to the browser where it is finally decoded again in JavaScript using jsmpeg. All the mouse and keyboard input in the browser is captured as well and sent back to the server again.

This works way better than it should. Latency is minimal and only affected by the network conditions. It's certainly good enough to play most types of games.

Update: I did some latency measurement now. For my system it hovers around 50-70ms (video, photo). Tested with an 800x600 window at ~7% CPU utilization on a Core i5. My desktop monitor is a Dell U2711, which seems to add about 15ms latency itself.

Full source code and binary releases are on github: jsmpeg-vnc