Starwire is a Moonlight Android client for streaming from a Vibepollo host to a RedMagic Astra tablet (Snapdragon 8 Elite, Android 16) with a GameSir G8+. It keeps Moonlight X's video pipeline (Direct Frame Pacing, PyroWave, Vulkan renderer) and adds Artemide's options and in-stream menu, selected features from other forks, and a new UI.
Base: Moonlight X (MoreOrLessSoftware/moonlight-android, branch mlsoft-x).
Work happens on branches and is merged into main. Every source below is GPL-3.0, so
Starwire is GPL-3.0 too.
Each step ends with a build installed on the tablet, and many come with on-device tests in
app/src/androidTest. Anything marked "not yet tried" below hasn't been checked on real hardware.
- Rename the app to "Starwire" (
com.starwire, debug buildscom.starwire.debug), so it installs beside Moonlight X and Artemide instead of replacing them.
Source: Artemide Experimental Async 0.5.1 (derflacco/moonlight-android, tag
Artemide_Experimental_Async_0.5.1), the version installed on the tablet.
- In-stream menu. Artemide's actions are added to Moonlight X's overlay menu
(icon buttons, controller navigation) rather than Artemide's plain list dialog.
- Floating menu button: tap to open, drag to move; on by default, with a setting under Overlay Menu and a show/hide button in the menu
- Shortcuts page with Artemide's 14 key combos (Esc, F11, Alt+F4, Alt+Enter, Ctrl+V, Win, Win+D, Win+G, Ctrl+Alt+Tab, Shift+Tab, Win+Shift+Left, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12, Win+Alt+B)
- Task Manager, Rotate screen, On-screen controller toggle
- Disconnect, Quit session, Stats, Soft keyboard, Mouse emulation (already in Moonlight X)
- Pan/zoom mode (pinch to zoom, drag to pan, double-tap to reset)
- Touch mode picker with Artemide's six modes (multi-touch, direct touch, natural and gaming trackpad, disabled, swapped clicks); starts from the trackpad setting each stream
- Touch sensitivity: a trackpad sensitivity setting, toggled from the menu
- Clipboard send/get and PC (server) commands. Vibepollo supports both
(
/actions/clipboard, packet 0x3000); each needs the client's permission in Vibepollo. Server commands needed a change to moonlight-common-c, committed to Starwire's fork (SicarioGaming/moonlight-common-c) - On-screen full keyboard (Full Keyboard in the menu): Artemide's 82-key layout, key popups, vibration and sticky Ctrl/Alt/Shift/Win, with opacity and vibration settings. Keys go straight to the host as keyboard input
- Automatic clipboard sync (Host Settings): sends this device's clipboard when the stream starts or you return to it, copies the PC's when you leave (also before Disconnect and Quit Session, waiting up to 2 seconds); optional messages and "hide clipboard content"
- Not ported: Artemide's customisable on-screen key buttons (KeyBoardController, ~3,000 lines)
- Custom shortcuts imported from a file, in Artemide's format (
{"data": [{"name": ..., "keys": ["VK_LWIN", "0x53"]}]}), from Settings > In-stream menu. They appear on the Shortcuts page after the built-in ones; importing again replaces them, and a bad file says what's wrong and keeps the earlier import. Example:docs/shortcuts-example.json. (Moonlight X's custom commands still cover adding your own by hand)
- Virtual Display: a "Display on the PC" setting (host default, virtual, primary) and
"Start in Virtual/Primary Display" when long-pressing a game. Host default sends nothing,
because Vibepollo treats
virtualDisplay=0as turning its virtual display off - Prevent Packet Loss: a tiny ignored control packet every 20 ms keeps Wi-Fi awake
(new
LiSendKeepAlivePayloadin common-c) - V-Sync and Fast V-Sync: one "V-Sync" setting (Off, V-Sync, Fast V-Sync), off by default and used only by the direct renderer. Fast V-Sync is Artemide's nano pacer (NanoPacer.java) in "Prefer lowest latency" pacing. Artemide's own V-Sync only drives its GL upscaler, which Starwire doesn't have, so V-Sync here holds each frame for the next display refresh instead
- Sync: LFR: off by default; in Balanced pacing keeps only the newest decoded frame (the other pacing modes already drain to the newest frame)
- Async decode and Async: LFR, both off by default (Async LFR needs Async decode). Artemide's AsyncCodecAdapter, used only by the direct renderer without host frame timing. Codec recovery follows Artemide: release queued buffers, start() after flush, detach callbacks before stop()/reset() and attach them again before configure(). Tested against the device's real H.264 decoder, including all three recovery paths
- Untouched by all of the above: the Vulkan renderer, host frame timing pacing, PyroWave
- Lite mode performance overlay: one centered line with bandwidth, network/decode delay, loss and FPS (Advanced settings, under "Show performance stats")
- Check Moonlight X's existing Ultra Low Latency and Force Full Range Video
against Artemide's behaviour (2026-10-21, against Artemide's
MediaCodecHelperandMediaCodecDecoderRendererat the 0.5.1 tag)- Force Full Range: the same in both (asks the PC for full range, and tells the decoder
with
KEY_COLOR_RANGE); Starwire also passes it to the Vulkan renderer. No change - Ultra Low Latency: the same for Snapdragon (like the tablet's 8 Elite), Exynos and
decoders with Android's own low-latency support. Ported the two differences:
MediaTek's
vendor.mtk.vdec.ultra-low-latencynow follows the setting (Moonlight X always set it to 0), and low-latency is set again after the decoder starts (Android 11+) - Left as Moonlight X's: Artemide's other MediaTek queue/preload values and its NVIDIA Tegra and legacy OMX Qualcomm extras. They aren't part of this setting, and there's no such device here to try them on
- Force Full Range: the same in both (asks the PC for full range, and tells the decoder
with
| Feature | Source fork |
|---|---|
| More ways to open the menu (long-press). Three-finger tap and holding Select, Start, Guide or LB+RB already work in Moonlight X | Moonlight X Turnip (NoCrypt/moonlight-x-turnip) |
| Per-game settings (resolution, FPS, bitrate, frame pacing) | Moonlight X Turnip |
| Custom PyroWave Vulkan driver (Turnip via libadrenotools) | Moonlight X Turnip |
| Better performance stats (1% lows, received vs displayed FPS warning) | Moonlight V+ (qiin2333/moonlight-vplus), Moonlight X Turnip |
| Change bitrate mid-stream from the menu | Moonlight V+ |
| Audio haptics (bass becomes vibration) | Moonlight V+ |
| Pinch-to-zoom anytime, accurate taps while zoomed | Moonlit Artemis (4had45/moonlit-artemis) |
| Monitor switcher | Moonlit Artemis |
Done so far (2026-10-21):
- Monitor switcher: Monitors page in the menu, Monitor 1-6 send Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1-F6
- Bitrate mid-stream: Bitrate in the menu, 5-500 Mbps, via Vibepollo
/bitrate - Better stats: 1% low FPS (average of the slowest 1% of frame gaps) in both overlays
- Pinch to zoom anytime (Input settings, on by default; not in Multi-touch mode)
- Per-game settings: App Settings (long-press a game) can also set the video codec, V-Sync, Sync: LFR, Async decode, Async: LFR, Display on the PC, touch mode, Hide PC cursor and Audio haptics for that game or Quick Launch item; each defaults to the global setting
- Audio haptics (Audio settings, off by default): bass below ~120 Hz drives this device's vibration and/or the first controller's heavy motor, with a strength setting. The tablet's motor is on/off only, so strength becomes pulse length there. Game rumble and audio haptics share the controller (the stronger wins)
- Custom PyroWave driver (Advanced settings, experimental, off by default): ported from
Moonlight X Turnip (
0703b360). Pick a Turnip .so/.zip/.adpkg; only PyroWave uses it. The libadrenotools and hook libraries in the repo were built from the pinned upstream commit (adrenotools/SOURCE) rather than copied from the fork's prebuilts. Added: files that aren't 64-bit ARM libraries are refused, and a driver that can't load or can't run PyroWave falls back to the system driver (tested with a broken file only). No speed measurements. Not yet tried with a real Turnip driver
Also added on request: Warp Drive / Warp 2 frame pacing (from Artemide), Hide PC cursor (never / while touching / always), and Long-press to right-click in the gaming trackpad mode.
- Per-game settings already exist in Moonlight X (long-press a game, App Settings: resolution, FPS, bitrate, frame pacing, HDR, stats; plus Quick Launch). Remaining: add Starwire's new options (V-Sync, LFR, async decode, touch mode) to it.
- Bitrate mid-stream: Vibepollo
GET /bitrate?bitrate=<kbps>(HTTPS, any streaming client), clamps to the host maximum and returns the applied value inroot.bitrate. - Monitor switcher: Vibepollo switches display on Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1..F13 (input.cpp,
switch_display), so a menu page sending those keys is enough. - Better stats: Moonlight X already shows received vs rendered FPS variance; add 1% lows.
- Pinch-to-zoom anytime: detect a two-finger pinch (finger span changes) outside pan/zoom mode and hand that gesture to PanZoomHandler; not in multi-touch mode.
- Custom PyroWave driver: NoCrypt commit
0703b360(remoteturnip), 22 files, ~800 lines plus libadrenotools arm64 prebuilts and native Vulkan loader changes. Port it withgit cherry-pick-style care, since our base has newer Vulkan renderer code. - Audio haptics: new; low-pass the decoded audio, drive the device vibrator or controller rumble.
- Mockups of the new look to choose from before building (2026-10-21). Chosen: B · Cover Glow: the screens take their colour from the selected game's cover art, frosted panels, a big "last played" hero with that game's settings as chips, plain-language settings with a "What you'll feel" panel, and the in-stream menu as a frosted side sheet tinted by the game
- Cover Glow game screen: hero for the selected game tinted by its cover, cover row, PC list
with frosted cards (renders in
docs/images/cover_glow_home.png,docs/images/cover_glow_pcs.png) - Cover Glow settings: back button and title, a pill per section that jumps to it and
follows the scroll, teal headings, white rows; per-game settings share the look. The PC
list's overrides bar uses frosted pills (
docs/images/cover_glow_settings.png) - Settings: plain-language section names (English only; other languages keep their translated headings), and a "What you'll feel" panel on wide screens that places the frame pacing and V-Sync choices between fastest response and smoothest motion, with rough delay and battery comparisons (not measurements)
- Cover Glow in-stream menu: a side sheet on the right in the game's cover colour, with
the game and stream on top, a grid of tools, and Close, Quit and Disconnect at the bottom;
controllers move by rows and columns (
docs/images/cover_glow_menu.png) - Icon tiles for apps without cover art (Desktop, Steam Big Picture, Playnite and so on), chosen under Settings → App → App covers; a flowing rainbow on the wordmark and the selected game's ring; a faint dot grid and HUD-style tags for a gamer feel
- Predicted impact lists what's moving it (frame pacing, V-Sync, Async LFR) and which way; settings taken from another fork show a quiet credit line under the panel when tapped
- In-stream menu: five tiles across with Full Keyboard next to Keyboard, a nearly opaque panel, the selected row scrolled into view, and a bigger floating button
- Larger Starwire wordmark on the home screen
- Tried on the RedMagic Astra over a live stream: the menu tools work; the last row of the menu was hidden by a layout bug, now fixed and covered by a test
- After launch feedback: a smaller floating button that stays faded until touched; on/off menu tools show a small switch and keep the menu open; a Starwire tile (logo over a starfield) for Desktop and games without cover art, also in the menu's header; Lite stats in plain words (Mbps, Ping, Decode, Dropped, FPS)
- Microphone from the device to the PC, ported from logabell's design (a separate audio channel). Only works with logabell's Apollo build on the PC
- Microphone with any host (Vibepollo, Sunshine, regular Apollo): a VBAN stream to Starwire's own receiver on the PC, which plays it into VB-Cable; one setup script installs both. Not encrypted or authenticated in 0.2.0; encrypted, and only from paired devices, from 0.2.1 (below)
- Microphone receiver for macOS and Linux (the Windows one is in
windows/) - Microphone over the stream itself with Vibepollo or regular Apollo: waiting for either to accept logabell's design
- Narrow screens and foldables: the settings list kept no width on narrow screens (a Galaxy Z
Fold's cover screen); the game screen and the stream menu now fit small screens too, with
on-device layout tests at phone and foldable sizes (the tablet's display resized with
adb shell wm size)
- GitHub repo cleanup, after
u/rambo3349's code review
in the 0.2.0 Reddit thread. The public repo now carries the real history, every commit with
its own description and sharing history with Moonlight X, so upstream changes can be merged
again. Before, it had one commit per folder with the same few messages. The switch on
23 Oct was a plain fast-forward, so clones, forks and the release tags kept working; an old
account name and the PC's name were taken out of the maintainer's commits first. Also:
every prebuilt library is traced to its source and rebuilt byte for byte on GitHub
(
docs/PROVENANCE.md,prebuilts.yml), the 0.2.0 mic measurements are published with their raw data and a script that recomputes them (docs/measurements/), the README and the release pages say plainly which features are experimental,SECURITY.md(with private vulnerability reporting) andCONTRIBUTING.mdwere added, and.github/tools/check-publish.shkeeps secrets and personal details out of anything pushed to the public repo. This part is already live; it didn't need a release - Encrypted microphone (SWMC version 1,
docs/dev/mic-protocol.md): each device pairs with the PC once with a 16-character code from the receiver's Pair a device..., and in Starwire Pair with the PC. Each stream gets its own AES-256-GCM key, and the receiver refuses devices it hasn't paired, replayed, late and forged packets, and plain VBAN unless it's set up with-AllowUnencrypted. A "Not encrypted" option stays in the app for Voicemeeter and other VBAN apps, and 0.2.0's default moves to the encrypted receiver once. The receiver now plays through WASAPI, with waveOut if WASAPI doesn't work. Updating from 0.2.0 needs both sides and pairing once. Tested: the app and the receiver agree on a shared vectors file (SwmcCodecTest,windows/tests/run-tests.ps1); a loopback run on one PC (windows/tests/e2e-loopback.ps1) played every packet in order and refused a replayed, a late, two forged and one plain VBAN packet; encrypting took about 6.5 microseconds per packet in a benchmark on the tablet; and on 23 Oct a real stream from the tablet to the PC over Wi-Fi, with a receiver that only takes encrypted audio, had sound only while the stream ran. Dropouts weren't counted in that test - Custom PyroWave driver: the setting says it's experimental, and the first time it's turned
on, a warning says what a driver file can do and asks first. Imports are checked (a plain
file name, at most 64 MB, a 64-bit ARM library, or an archive of at most 64 files holding
one) and replace the earlier driver; a refused file keeps it. The SHA-256 is recorded at
import, shown under the setting and checked before every load, and only files inside
Starwire's driver folder are loaded (a symlink out of it is refused). Archives unpack into
a folder named after their SHA-256, which fixes a different archive with the same library
name reusing the old library. The driver can be removed, and it's left out of backups.
JVM tests in
CustomVulkanDriverImportTest, device tests inCustomVulkanDriverTest. A driver imported by 0.2.0 has no recorded SHA-256, so it has to be chosen again. Still not tried with a real Turnip driver - Async decode's flush recovery never hands out a buffer from before the flush. One the
codec offered just before
flush()was handed out afterstart()once, on the small phone emulator, and failed with "index 0 is not owned by client". JVM tests inAsyncCodecFlushTest;AsyncDecodeTestpassed its flush recovery 25 times in a row on the RedMagic tablet - With animations off, the game screen's endless animations (the glow, the floating
cover, the rainbow, the ring round the chosen game, the stars) stay still. Android 5 to
7.1 ran them every frame, so the screen never stopped redrawing and the Android 6
emulator's tests hung. Before Android 8 they also stop, not pause, while the screen is out
of sight, since a paused one there still wakes the CPU every frame. JVM tests in
LoopsTest. Not yet tried on a real Android 5 to 7.1 device or rerun on the emulator - The in-stream menu's tools grid fades out at an edge with more tools to scroll to (a
phone, a Fold's cover screen, a small handheld), and the controller's selection stops
clear of the fade. Checked at every screen size in
ActivityScreensTest, and inGridScrollTest
- Artemide has no option named "Tight Vsync"; its V-Sync options are V-Sync, Fast V-Sync, Sync: LFR and Async: LFR, and all four are planned above.
- Clipboard sync, server commands and Virtual Display were built for Apollo; check each one against Vibepollo while testing.