Xbox One streaming offers very high quality on Windows 10

By Jon Martindale August 18, 2015

XBox DVR Windows 10 — guteksk7/Shutterstock

Last week we learned that there was actually a hidden option for streaming Xbox One games to Windows 10, that allowed for it to appear at an even higher quality level. To enable it you needed to tweak some specific configuration files, which seemed like a lot of work for a feature that many found very useful. Fortunately, Microsoft has changed its ways since then and made the option available to all as the default setting for streaming.

Considering most people will want to play their streamed games at the highest quality possible, it seems strange that Microsoft didn’t do this in the first place, but it is at least now available for those that didn’t want to mess with files to achieve the same goal.

Other quality options are still present if you would prefer to put less stress on your local network, with High, Medium and Low settings all offering different levels of compression for the stream. However we would imagine that most users will skip over those for the much more attractive “Very High” option that’s now readily available.

It’s worth noting that as useful as the streaming ability is in making it possible to play games away from the living room TV, there may still be some quality loss through the stream, since technically the user is looking at a video of the game, rather than the game itself.

If you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 and happen to own an Xbox One, what do you think of the new streaming feature? Is it nice to be able to play your Xbox One games somewhere other than the living room TV?

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