lizardbyte/sunshine

Sunshine is a self-hosted game streaming server that lets you play PC games remotely on other devices using the Moonlight client. The problem it solves is the same one NVIDIA's GeForce Experience (GameStream) was built for, streaming your gaming PC's screen over the network to a phone, tablet, TV, or another computer, but as a fully open-source, self-hosted alternative that works with any GPU, not just NVIDIA hardware. When NVIDIA discontinued GameStream, Sunshine became the primary community-supported replacement. The way it works is that Sunshine runs on your gaming PC (the "host") and captures the screen, encodes the video using your GPU's hardware encoder, and streams it over the network in real time at very low latency. Clients connect using the Moonlight app, which is available on iOS, Android, smart TVs, and other platforms. The encoding hardware used depends on your GPU: NVIDIA cards use NVENC, AMD uses AMF (on Windows), Intel uses QuickSync or VAAPI, and Apple silicon Macs use VideoToolbox. A browser-based configuration panel lets you manage the app list and pair client devices without touching the command line. Gamepad input from the client is emulated on the host, so the game sees a real controller. Keyboard and mouse input from the remote device is also forwarded. You would use Sunshine when you want to play games from your powerful desktop PC while sitting somewhere else in the house, on a couch connected to a TV via a streaming device, on an iPad, or on a laptop. It is also used for general remote desktop access, not just games. The tech stack is C++ with CMake, runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, and is available as a Docker image, Flatpak, or native installer.