Oculus Quest gains DLNA, virtual desktops, and more with Bigscreen update

Stream movies with your friends while you work at home, all in VR.

What you need to know

• DLNA support makes streaming movies over your home network much easier than using local storage.
• A new friends list, dozens of new environments, and thousands of new 2D and 3D movies make it easier than ever to watch with friends.
• New multitasking support means you can finally work from the comfort of your home without losing your extra monitors from the office.

Bigscreen has long been one of the very best ways to virtually watch movies and play games with friends, and that experience is about to get a whole lot better in this latest free update from the company, first found by VR Focus. While the video player launched on the Oculus Quest earlier this summer, the local playback limitations made it a bit difficult to actually watch those movies with your friends or family. Now with DLNA support, you’ll be able to stream any MP4, MKV, or AVI file from your PC or network-attached storage straight to Bigscreen and watch these files with your friends and family remotely. Plex and other popular media servers are officially supported, which makes it super easy to get started.

As always, you’ll be able to invite friends and family to watch these videos together. The biggest advantage of DLNA support is that the videos will play directly over the network instead of having to stream your desktop, which likely will lead to better quality and fewer issues from network congestion and the like. Bigscreen is also implementing a brand new friends system to make it far easier to invite folks, as well as dozens of new environments to watch and play in.

Aside from the new environments and quality of life features, Bigscreen is adding a major new movie studio to the mix, which will add “thousands” of new 2D and 3D movies to Bigscreen Cinema. These new film additions also include a major unreleased blockbuster film that’ll debut on Bigscreen the same day it’s available in theaters. Bigscreen is just teasing this announcement for now and will reveal more details soon.

Aside from the usual socializing aspects of Bigscreen, this new update makes it easy to finally work from home using Bigscreen thanks to the new virtual monitor support. You’ll now be able to use multiple virtual monitors when streaming from a PC to your Oculus Quest (or another compatible headset). That means all those monitors you used to have at work can finally be brought home, albeit in a much more flexible virtual form. Move and resize these monitors to your heart’s content, drag apps and content between them, and anything else you might do on regular physical monitors, all without the extra cost and setup that those require. Oh, and of course, you’ll be able to pop up additional monitors for watching media at the same time, if you so choose.

Virtual greatness

Oculus Quest

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