Roadmap

A quick map of where punktfunk is today and where it's heading. For the detailed, dated changelog, see Status & Progress.

Legend: ✅ shipped · 🟡 in progress · 🔭 planned · ⛔ blocked upstream

At a glance

✅ Shipped

• The host, two ways. The lower-latency native punktfunk/1 protocol (QUIC control + UDP data with GF(2¹⁶) Leopard FEC + AES-GCM) — the secure default — and, opt-in via serve --gamestream, a GameStream host any Moonlight client can use. Both run from one process.
• Native-resolution virtual displays on Linux across KWin, GNOME/Mutter, gamescope, and Sway/wlroots, with a fully zero-copy GPU path to NVENC (stable 240 fps at 5120×1440).
• A native Windows host (x64; NVIDIA/AMD/Intel encode) — a signed installer with secure-desktop capture and a bundled virtual-display driver, and the only host that can stream HDR (10-bit BT.2020 PQ, captured from an HDR Windows desktop and encoded as HEVC Main10). See Windows Host. (Beta — newer than the Linux host.)
• Clients on every platform — native apps for Apple (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS), Linux, Android (phone + TV), and Windows, each with hardware decode, controllers including DualSense, audio + mic, and automatic host discovery. See Clients.
• Secure by default — SPAKE2 PIN pairing with pinned reconnects, one-click delegated approval from the web console, and mDNS LAN auto-discovery.
• Tuned for latency — concurrent sessions (stream one desktop to several devices at once), mid-stream resolution renegotiation, a cross-machine clock-skew handshake, a 1 Gbps+ data plane, an in-app network speed test that informs the bitrate picker, and automatic adaptive bitrate (the encoder re-targets mid-stream when bitrate is set to Automatic).
• Surround sound — 5.1 and 7.1 end to end: the host encodes multichannel via multistream Opus and the native clients render more than two channels, with clean, synchronous stereo where the path is stereo.
• Clipboard sync — bidirectional text and images between host and client, carried on a side plane over the native protocol's QUIC channel.

🟡 In progress

• Windows client on-glass validation. Hardware decode and the GUI are validated on NVIDIA and Intel; the HDR present path still needs verification on real HDR hardware.
• Apple presenter polish. The lower-latency VTDecompressionSession → CAMetalLayer stage-2 path is now the default; HDR brightness and 4:4:4 still need on-glass validation.
• Web console parity. Surfacing the speed test and bitrate picker the apps already have.
• Windows host hardening. Broader real-world testing — especially on-glass validation of the AMD (AMF) and Intel (QSV) encode paths, which are CI-green but newer than NVENC.

🔭 Planned

• Magic multi-user support. Map a connecting client to a real user account on the host and log them in automatically. The client picks an identity — e.g. an Apple TV profile — which maps to an available host profile (likely behind a second per-user auth layer); on connect to an idle host, the user lands in their own desktop/session, signed in, without touching the host. Turns one box into a personal, profile-aware streaming target for a household.
• Object-based spatial audio. With 5.1/7.1 surround shipped, the frontier is object-based sound. Capturing game audio objects on native Windows is blocked by a closed renderer API, but Proton already routes them through Wine's ISpatialAudioClient — where it currently discards the dynamic/height objects and their 3D positions. Finishing that rendering would give every Proton gamer real spatial sound, and tunnelling the objects + positions to the client would let punktfunk spatialize them on the client — head-tracked remote spatial audio (to AirPods and the like) that no streaming stack does today.
• Sub-frame pipelining. Overlap encode and transmit within a single frame (a direct NVENC slice path) — the next big latency lever at high resolutions.
• True glass-to-glass latency measured end to end (capture → on-screen present).
• gamescope multi-user isolation. Per-session input and audio so concurrent clients are fully independent desktops (the shared-desktop case already works).
• Peer-approved pairing. Approve a new device from an already-paired device's own app.
• WAN / anywhere access. Reach a host beyond the LAN — NAT traversal (ICE/STUN/TURN) plus a self-hostable relay for when no direct path can be punched, and QUIC connection migration so a client roams between networks (Wi-Fi ↔ cellular) without dropping the session. The control plane is already QUIC over UDP, so this is mostly signalling and relay rather than a protocol change.
• VRR / adaptive-sync passthrough. Variable refresh end to end — the host renders at a variable rate and the client presents with tearing-control/VRR instead of a fixed cadence, for tear- and judder-free gaming. Builds on the client's presentation-feedback path and the per-session virtual outputs.
• Desktop quality-of-life. More of the essentials that make remote work pleasant, each a new side plane over the existing QUIC datagram channel: multi-monitor streaming (present the host's several outputs as separate client windows) and virtual-webcam redirection (the client's camera shows up as a webcam on the host, so video calls run on the remote machine). (Clipboard sync already shipped — see above.)

⛔ Parked / blocked

• HDR / 10-bit on the Linux host — virtual displays. GNOME 50 added HDR screencasting for monitor streams, and the host now uses it: the GameStream desktop mirror (PUNKTFUNK_VIDEO_SOURCE=portal) negotiates the 10-bit PQ formats and encodes HEVC Main10 BT.2020 PQ (punktfunk-host hdr-probe reports readiness; on-glass validation pending). What stays blocked upstream is HDR on virtual monitors — Mutter's RecordVirtual streams are still SDR-only (through the GNOME 51 dev branch), so the native protocol and GameStream's default virtual-display source stream 8-bit until that lands; the host is ready the moment it does.
• Advanced DualSense voice-coil haptics. Scoped and shelved (it rides the controller's USB audio interface, with near-zero game support on Linux). Adaptive triggers, rumble, and the lightbar already ship.