SunshineStream/Sunshine

Overview

Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight clients. It runs on your own gaming machine and handles screen capture, hardware or software video encoding, gamepad emulation, and client pairing, so any Moonlight client on a supported device can connect to it. A browser-based web UI is used for configuration and pairing, either locally or from a mobile device.

It is aimed at people who want cloud-gaming-style streaming from their own hardware rather than a commercial service. Hardware encoding is supported for AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs, with software encoding as a fallback, and capture/encoding support varies by operating system and GPU vendor (L49-L63).

Getting started

1. Check the minimum system requirements before installing: a supported GPU encode path (AMD VCE, Intel QuickSync/VAAPI, or Nvidia NVENC), a supported OS version, and a 5GHz 802.11ac network on both host and client (L391-L526).
2. Install Sunshine from the latest release. Packages are also available via Flathub, Winget, Docker and GHCR for containerized setups.
3. Open the Sunshine web UI in a browser, set credentials, and pair a Moonlight client using the PIN shown by the client.
4. Start a stream from the Moonlight side; capture and encoding methods can be selected in the web UI.

The README defers detailed installation and configuration instructions to the Sunshine documentation. For an overview of downloads and platform support, see the project website.

Constraints

• OS support: FreeBSD 15.1+, Debian 13+, Fedora 43+, Ubuntu 22.04+, macOS 15.0+, Windows 11+ (L391-L526).
• Hardware encoding depends on the GPU and OS; for example, AMF and QuickSync are Windows-only, NVENC is Linux/Windows, and Video Toolbox is macOS-only.
• Linux/FreeBSD capture has multiple backends (KMS/DRM, X11, Wayland/wlroots, XDG Desktop Portal, KWin Screencast) with different encoder compatibility; NvFBC only pairs with NVENC and X11.
• Full gamepad profiles on macOS and Windows require the separately installed and licensed Virtual HID Broker; Xbox 360 and DualShock 4 can alternatively use ViGEmBus on Windows.
• The system requirement tables are marked as work in progress and should not be used to purchase hardware without verification.
• Licensed under GPL-3.0.

HotRepo's take

The repository is a mature C++ project with about 43.3k stars and 2.4k forks. In the HotRepo-recorded C++ weekly list for 2026-11-13 it ranked 8th and gained 329 stars in that period. That single snapshot shows continued attention, but without a longer same-metric series it is not enough to characterize a trend. The practical draw is the combination of self-hosting, broad OS support, and a documented compatibility matrix rather than a single headline feature.