Starfire And Comet — Self-Hosted Game Streaming Without A Cloud

🪩 The Disco Party is MATA's distributed cloud.

Starfire is a Sunshine-compatible GameStream client written in native Rust for Windows and Mac. Comet is the GameStream host for self-hosted Windows games, wired through remade_ffmpeg_rs. Together they are self-hosted game streaming that does not rent a session from a vendor cloud. You already own the PC that can play the game. Starfire and Comet make that PC the server, and the laptop on the couch the display. No GeForce Now queue. No Stadia-shaped disappearance. No monthly tax on a library you purchased.

A distributed cloud that cannot move frames is a spreadsheet with extra steps. Games are the honest latency test. If the mesh can carry input and video at GameStream quality, it can carry the rest of a living room. What Is A Distributed Cloud is the architecture. This article is the fun part that still has to be remade.

Why Starfire Makes Self-Hosted Game Streaming A Mesh Job

Moonlight and Sunshine already proved the protocol. They also proved the C/C++ CVE surface: RTP parsers, frame sizes, decoder lifecycles. Starfire rebuilds the client so those classes of bug never compile. Self-hosted game streaming stays compatible with existing Sunshine hosts and GameStream endpoints, so you can adopt the client first. Comet is the host-side remake for Windows: hardware encode first, GameStream on the wire, Comet-native mode when the other end is Starfire.

Trust is the machine you already logged into — mID if you want the stream gated by a capability, not a shared PIN on the fridge. Security is encrypted frames on a path you control, not a vendor decoder farm. Incentive is spare GPU time that can earn when you are not playing, the same idle-device story as the rest of the disco. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the file on cloud-gaming accounts that die with the service. Self-hosted game streaming does not die with a SKU.

The Disco Party is where a game PC becomes a peer, not a product you rent back from the company that sold it.

How Starfire And Comet Run Self-Hosted Game Streaming

Capture on the host. Encode on the GPU. Ship GameStream. Decode on the client. That pipeline has been C for a decade. remade_ffmpeg_rs is the memory-safe media layer Comet leans on. Starfire is the memory-safe client. The Importance of Remade With Rust is why that split matters: one remade codec stack, two deliverables.

Starfire — The Self-Hosted Game Streaming Client

Windows and Mac first. Sunshine-compatible so a host you already run keeps working. Native Rust for the packet parser, input pipeline, and network state machine. Self-hosted game streaming clients historically ship CVEs in exactly those modules. Starfire deletes the language they were written in. Cards and status live on Remade With Rust. Source sits with the org at github.com/Remade-With-Rust.

Comet — The Windows Host Beside Starfire

Comet captures the desktop, encodes with NVENC, AMF, QuickSync, or VideoToolbox-class hardware, and speaks GameStream so Moonlight clients still work. Pair it with Starfire for the native path. It uses remade_ffmpeg_rs instead of shipping a 25-year-old C buffer parser into a 2026 living room. Self-hosted game streaming on Windows is the shipping target because that is where the games are. The IETF RTP discussion is the long background on media congestion. Comet's job is to stay inside a LAN or an encrypted mesh hop, not to invent a new CDN.

remade_ffmpeg_rs Is The Codec Floor Under Self-Hosted Game Streaming

Every stream is a codec problem. A distributed cloud that decodes on a stranger's laptop needs a remade decoder. remade_ffmpeg_rs is that decoder and encoder story for the house. Deputy keeps ffmpeg-sys from walking back in. The NIST Secure Software Development Framework wants memory-safe parsers on untrusted input. A game stream is untrusted input with a joystick.

Self-Hosted Game Streaming Belongs On The Disco Party

When the host is your PC and the client is Starfire, the "cloud" is the house. When the house joins iroh — peer-to-peer device sync — a friend can play on a grant you issued, not on a vendor session. Digital Freedom Era 2 is peers. Era 3 is the wider mesh. The Freedom Guide is still how a human gets a wallet. This page is how that human keeps a library.

Starfire Does Not Need A Vendor Queue

GeForce Now and its cousins are polite about your games until the license map changes. Self-hosted game streaming is rude in the useful way: if the PC is on, the session is yours. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse is full of accounts that outlived the company's interest. Starfire does not create that account.

Capability Tokens Beat A Shared Stream PIN

Distributed cloud access is a grant. Share a stream with a scoped token. Revoke it when the guest leaves. The NIST Zero Trust Architecture applies to a living room. A sticky note on the router does not.

Remade Primitives, Disco Party, Digital Freedom

Starfire, Comet, and remade_ffmpeg_rs are Remade-With-Rust primitives (Comet stays a host you run; the client and protocol crates are the open face). They become a disco party when self-hosted game streaming rides the same peer-to-peer distributed cloud as vaults and shards. They become Digital Freedom when Trust, Security, and Incentive — identity, encryption, payouts — apply to playtime. Start at the Disco Party and What Is Digital Freedom. Install Starfire. Host with Comet. Stop renting the fun.

The encoder under both tools is remade_ffmpeg_rs. The nodes that can host a stream are Rust edge nodes. H.264 without x264's C is rusty_h264.