Valve has slipped an experimental new video codec into the latest Steam Beta, and it’s garnered enough confidence for an open public test. Pyrowave, developed by graphics engineer Hans-Kristian Arntzen, represents a philosophical departure from how Remote Play has traditionally approached video streaming.
The philosophy is straightforward: throw bandwidth at the problem and eliminate latency. The codec consumes five to ten times the bandwidth of existing streaming solutions, which means gigabit ethernet between host and client is essentially mandatory. In exchange for the colossal bandwidth, you get exceptionally low end-to-end latency achieved through GPU-accelerated encode and decode paths. For competitive play or anything requiring tight responsiveness, that trade-off makes sense.
Pyrowave supports YUV 4:4:4 color precision and HDR encoding, both disabled by default but available for users with sufficient bandwidth or those prioritizing color fidelity over streaming efficiency. The codec offers a quality slider for visual tuning, or manual bitrate control between 100 and 500 Mbit/s if you prefer direct command over automatic adaptation.
On the implementation side, Valve is positioning Pyrowave behind an opt-in toggle in Steam Remote Play’s advanced settings, available now in the beta client on macOS and Windows. Linux users need to enable the experimental SteamRT3 Steam Client through System Settings; the mobile Steam Link app will receive support later. The codec isn’t enabled by default, which is sensible given its bandwidth appetite.
Also worth noting: Arntzen published the codec’s code-base as open-source code under the MIT licence, meaning community implementations like Sunshine, Artemis, and Moonlight should be able to adopt it. For users with adequate network capacity and local streaming setups, Pyrowave might genuinely improve responsiveness. For others, existing codecs remain the practical choice. That said, Valve’s willingness to experiment with radical bandwidth trade-offs can only be seen as a positive.
Source: Gaming On Linux
