Does anybody uses ALVR with BMS?

[Xeno]

Hi,

Does anyone has experience with BMS VR using ALVR to connect with standalone headset on Windows? Did someone made it work or it failed. If so how it fails.
This info would hep me remove one possible reasons why it doens’t work under Linux,leaving Proton or Linux SteamVR to blame.

[Xeno]

@Xeno
Just for anyone else looking for good alternative to proprietary streaming apps, ALVR works with BMS just fine, there’s lots of options to tweak, performance seems solid.
Can’t say for image quality/clarity as I’ve never used VD or Pico Streaming Assistant, but running BMS at about 3k pixels per eye I can read HUD,DED, instruments, most of the switches labels and MFDs symbols. Bullseye nimbers are a bit harder but still doable. Once res is cranked even higher, to 3,5-3,6k ppe bullseye symbols became perfectly clean, 'tho such res takes monster GPU to handle.

So, yep it seems viable alternative…

[SebastianR]

Yes, ALVR is a very good option

[TED]

I’ve been trying to get alvr to work but so far no luck with my pico 4. Not sure exactly yet where the issue is.
Those who use it, are u running pico streaming assistant first? What desktop streamer do u use or is this streamed via alvr?
I have everything installed - alvr opens on the desktop, the apk is installed on the pico 4.
Would anyone mind sharing a step by step guide of how they installed and use with bms?

[Xeno]

@TED
For ALVR you need to have installed
on our PC:

• SteamVR
• ALVR streamer
  on the headset
• alvr_client_android.apk

On the PC, if you have any firewall enabled, make sure it allows incoming traffic on ports 9943 and 9944 both TCP and UDP.

Start sequence:
on PC start:

• Steam
• ALVR streamer
• from ALVR launch SteamVR
  In steamVR settings, make sure ALVR add-on is not blocked, if so, unblock it and restart SteamVR.

on HMD start alvr-client (should be in ‘Unknown’ apps category)

On first run, you need to click ‘trust’ button on alvr-streamer connections tab to allow connections from your headset.
Once done you should good to go and be able to see SteamVR playerspace in the HMD.

If client is unable to connect, go to the logs tab on streamer and look for errors.

[TED]

Thanks very much for that description. Exactly what I needed. This was where i was missing. I didn’t have the alvr client installed properly on the headset!

on HMD start alvr-client (should be in ‘Unknown’ apps category)

[Xeno]

@TED
Nice thing about Pico is, all you need it to open browser on the HMD, go to ALVR github page, download client app and click it to install. No unnecessary questions , no fuss just click and go.

[Xeno]

Serously guys, give ALVR a try. Today just out of curiosity I did image quality test between latest VD and ALVR nightly.

Just a note for a test I disabled “full color range” option in ALVR. It suppoesedly had to improve color reproduction at extremes of color range, at least on my Pico it causes image to look washed out and lacking contrast. Render resolution used was 3056x3056 for both runs.

But even with old color computation algo ALVR did produce much clearer image than VD on godlike settings with 10-bit HEVC @150mbps bitrate. It also shimmered a bit less on ALVR.