I Need Some Tech Support Here. : Steam For Mac

Apple has added a new online chat option for AppleCare support, as by CNet. The option allows you to get one of Apple's support staff in a text conversation right in your browser. Here's how to find it. If you visit Apple's page, you'll find lots of options for manuals, videos, downloads, tech specs, and Apple's support boards(Communities). There is also an option to 'Contact Apple Support,' as shown in our first screenshot.

Apple's Main If you click or tap that square, you'll be taken to a page that explains some of your contact options. At the top of that page is the option to 'Get started,' as shown in our next screenshot. Get started Once you click the 'Get started' button, you're taken to a page where Apple's products and services are broken down into broad categories: Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, Apps & Software, and 'More Products & Services,' as shown below. At this point, you'll need to choose which device, product, or service you want support for.

You can easily do that from your Steam Settings panel. Step 3 - Submit a Steam Support ticket. If you've completed Steps 1 and 2 and are still seeing this error, please submit a ticket to Steam Support. We'll ask you for the following, so go ahead and include them with your ticket: An uncropped screenshot of.

In my examples, I chose 'Mac desktops' for no particular reason. Apple's Support Categories. Once you have selected your category, you will be asked to select from several categories of problems. In the case of Mac desktops, these ranged from startup and power to printing. Each product category has problem areas specific to those devices, so pick the one that represents your problem, and if you don't see it, check the 'Other Topics' area. In my example, I chose 'Mail and Other Applications.' Problem areas specific to your device, in this case Mac desktops.

Apple wants to narrow the problem further, so once you pick your main problem area, you will be asked to pick something very specific, as shown below. Note that 'The topic is not listed' is an option, so don't panic if you don't see yours. What's your specific problem? Once you have chosen your specific problem, you're given several options for contacting Apple. You can enter your phone number to receive a call back from AppleCare; you can schedule a call for another time; you can choose to contact AppleCare later while saving the choices you already made; or the new option, which is 'Chat.' Choose your option, Chat is at the bottom At this point, Apple wants to make sure you have AppleCare covering the device, and the company asks you to enter the serial number for the product.

This includes a handy set of instructions specific to the device on where to find that serial number. Give us your serial number In the case of our mock run for screenshots, the device in question ran out of AppleCare years ago. We were given a message offering us the option of purchasing a single incident of support for US$19 (plus tax), or requesting an exception. No AppleCare Coverage If we did have AppleCare, we would have been taken to the in-browser chat engine that would allow us to have a conversation with an AppleCare representative. This might seem like a lot of steps, but the process went very quickly.

If you feel confident in your ability to work through a problem through text, it's well worth the effort.

What is Steam In-Home Streaming? Steam in-home streaming allows you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the player’s computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player’s computer to the game process on the remote computer.

Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there. Overview of streaming from a PC to a Steam Machine How do I use it?. Login to the Steam client on two computers on the same network with the same account.

Go to the computer where you want to play and start playing your game. How do I improve my streaming experience? Hardware: We recommend a minimum of a quad-core CPU for the computer running the game. The client has more modest requirements, but should have a GPU that supports hardware accelerated H264 decoding. Any recent laptop or PC should meet the client requirements.

Network: We recommend using a wired network for the best streaming experience. People have had some success with powerline networks and wireless N and AC networks with good signal, though your experience may vary. Game Settings: To improve your streaming experience, you can go into your game settings and lower your resolution and turn off vertical sync. Steam Settings: In the In-Home Streaming settings you can change a number of things that can affect your experience. You can change your preference for speed vs quality, limit the network bandwidth, and adjust the maximum capture resolution.

Is there a community group? Yes, you can join the community group and discuss the feature with thousands of other players. Known issues General:. There is currently no indication of whether Steam is able to bind the discovery port 27036, but if that fails no other computers will show up in the remote computer list in the In-Home Streaming settings. If a game takes a long time to launch, it will time out on the client but will start anyway. Retrying the launch will connect to the running game. If this happens consistently for any particular game, please report it on the.

If your game loses focus, Steam will start streaming the desktop so that you can get back to it. This is a feature of Steam In-Home Streaming. Streaming non-Steam games in the Steam library may work but is not officially supported.

Surround sound is not currently supported and is converted to stereo. Voice recording over streaming is not currently supported. Streaming may not perform well when streaming to older systems with a single or dual core CPU and no hardware accelerated H264 decoding.

DirectInput controllers other than gamepad style controllers (wheels, flight controllers, etc.) are not currently supported. Other controllers using XInput are fully supported.

Certain games like 'Rome: Total War' use older DirectX technology which is not currently supported. Windows:. Streaming from a Windows XP host is not supported. UAC dialogs prevent streaming. If you're a game developer, please avoid requiring elevated permissions to run your game. Mac OS X:.

Streaming from a Mac OS X host is supported on Mac OS X 10.8 and newer. SteamOS / Linux:. In order to support streaming game controllers on a Linux host computer, /dev/uinput or /dev/input/uinput needs to be readable and writable by Steam.

Currently, there is no rumble support for Linux machines. What network ports does streaming use?

Streaming uses UDP ports 27031 and 27036 and TCP ports 27036 and 27037. Please make sure Steam can listen on these ports in your firewall software. The computers don't see each other Make sure they are on the same subnet and no other program is using UDP port 27036, which is used for the initial discovery protocol.

If another program has bound this port, please report which program it is on the. If you're running a Mac client, try rebooting after Steam is updated. Some people have also reported that custom firewalls or software like Hamachi interferes with the discovery process. I haven't updated video drivers A number of bugs have been fixed in the latest video driver releases that may affect streaming. If you are getting poor performance, graphical glitches or black screens please make sure you have the latest drivers installed from your video card vendor's website.

Steam looks really small on the host after streaming Exit Steam, right click Steam.exe and bring up the compatibility properties, uncheck 'Disable display scaling on high DPI settings', save the changes and restart Steam. I get 'The streaming client exited unexpectedly (2)' You can look in the streaming client log to get more details about what happened. On Windows this file is on the local computer in streamingclient.exe.log. On Linux this file is on the local computer in /tmp/streamingclient.log. Steam crashes or black screen when hosting from an NVIDIA laptop There is a bug in the NVIDIA driver which causes a crash or black screen if you're streaming from a laptop with Windows 8.1. Try opening the NVIDIA control panel and under 3D settings, set Steam to use integrated graphics, and then restart Steam.

I see a black screen when streaming a game. If it's a specific game that is having the issue, please report which game is having the issue on the. If all games are having the issue, please try the following:. Update your video drivers on both computers, if you haven't already. Try disabling hardware encoding in the advanced host settings on the remote computer. If this works, please report your host video card and driver version to the. Try disabling hardware decoding in the advanced client settings.

If this works, please report your client video card and driver version to the If none of those steps fix the issue, the problem may be the network packet size. To see the largest packet size that can be sent on your network, look up your ip address on the client computer, and then from your hosting computer run this from a command prompt: ping IPADDRESS -f -l 1472 If that number is too big, it'll show 'Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.' , and reduce it by 10 until the ping goes through. Then once it goes through, increase it by 1 until it stops going through. Then you can report the last number that works on the. If the number you get above is less than 1464, try increasing the MTU on your network interfaces and router to 1500. How do I enable Intel hardware encoding?

If you have an Ivy Bridge or newer system with an integrated GPU, you may be able to take advantage of Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration. To enable this, go to the Steam In-Home Streaming settings on the remote computer, open the advanced host options and check 'Enable hardware encoding' You can check to see what encoder and decoder is being used by turning on 'Display performance information' in the advanced client options on the client computer and then pressing F6 during the streaming session. If you see the word 'QuickSync' in the encoder description, you are using Intel hardware accelerated encoding. How do I enable NVIDIA hardware encoding? If you have a GTX 650 or newer and the latest NVIDIA drivers, you may be able to take advantage of NVIDIA hardware acceleration.

To enable this, go to the Steam In-Home Streaming settings on the remote computer, open the advanced host options and check 'Enable hardware encoding' You can check to see what encoder and decoder is being used by turning on 'Display performance information' in the advanced client options on the client computer and then pressing F6 during the streaming session. If you see the words 'NVFBC' or 'NVIFR' in the encoder description, you are using NVIDIA hardware accelerated encoding. I see persistent smearing on the screen with NVIDIA hardware encoding This is a known incompatibility between NVIDIA hardware encoding and the software decoder. Try enabling hardware decoding on the client or disabling hardware encoding in the advanced host options on the remote computer. I see big blocky color areas with NVIDIA hardware encoding This is a known incompatibility between NVIDIA hardware encoding and the hardware decoder on Mac OS X. Try disabling hardware encoding in the advanced host options on the remote computer.

I don't hear any audio when streaming a game. See if there is an audio error listed in logs streaminglog.txt on the remote computer. See if audio or the Steam application is muted on the remote computer. See if audio is muted on the local computer My game controller input doesn't affect the game If your game controller isn't recognized by any game, check to see if Steam Big Picture recognizes it in the controller settings on the client computer. You may need to configure your controller there in order to use it for streaming. Some games use raw input instead of XInput or DirectInput and are not yet supported.

If you are using an XBox 360 controller on a Mac, there is a publicly available driver that may work for you. My mouse and keyboard input don't affect the game Some games run with elevated permissions and Windows prevents remote input from affecting them, as a security measure. The following is a list of known games with this limitation:. Age of Empires 3. The Bard's Tale. Nether If you have a mouse and keyboard input problem with games not listed here, please report it on the.

My mouse cursor is invisible on Windows 8 Try plugging a mouse in on the remote computer. How do I diagnose streaming performance problems? You can look in logs streaminglog.txt on the remote computer after you play a game to get a detailed breakdown of how much time was spent in each component of the streaming system. While the game is running, you can hit F6 or the Guide button combined with the Y button on your game controller to turn on live statistics for the session. While the statistics are visible the game collects more detailed information which is saved in logs SteamVideoTrace.txt and logs SteamAudioTrace.txt at the end of the session. While the statistics are visible, you can hit F8 or the Guide button combined with the X button on your game controller to save a screenshot and 10 seconds worth of stats to a zip file in the streaming directory in the Steam folder on the remote computer. There is a good article on how to interpret the log information here.