OpenNOW Vita

A native homebrew GeForce NOW client for the PlayStation Vita, written in Rust. It signs in to your GFN account, browses your game library, negotiates a real WebRTC session against NVIDIA's streaming servers, and plays the game on the Vita's screen using the console's hardware H.264 decoder — with your controller input forwarded back to the game.

Architecturally it follows the trail blazed by green-vita (Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Vita): SDL2 + egui for the UI, direct-to-texture hardware video decoding, and VPK packaging via cargo-vita. The GFN protocol work builds on OpenNOW as a reference.

Disclaimer: this project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with NVIDIA or GeForce NOW in any way. It is an unofficial alternative client. You need your own GeForce NOW account to use it.

Features

• NVIDIA login on the console — device-code flow (QR code + short code on a second device), with tokens encrypted at rest (ChaCha20-Poly1305, key stored in the Vita's Safe Memory).
• Game library — your GFN catalog with cover art, server-side search, and game detail pages (GFN GraphQL API).
• Session brokering — CloudMatch session creation, queue position tracking, and seat-aware polling (re-polls the assigned game server directly once seated).
• Real WebRTC streaming — NVST WebSocket signaling, SDP offer/answer against NVIDIA's ICE-lite servers, DTLS-SRTP, and H.264 RTP depacketization, all through the sans-I/O rtc stack (no GStreamer, no browser).
• Hardware video decoding — sceAvcdec decodes each access unit straight into SDL/GXM textures (green-vita's direct-texture path: zero per-frame allocations, double-buffered, dynamic YUV420/BGR565 negotiation based on the stream's actual resolution).
• Audio playback — Opus RTP packets decoded via libopus and played through SDL2, tuned for low end-to-end latency (small jitter buffers on both audio and video so neither track drifts ahead of the other).
• Controller input — full gamepad state (buttons, sticks) sent 60×/s over the NVST input_channel_v1 data channel in XInput format.
• Session resilience — CloudMatch session polling tolerates transient server errors (isolated 5xx responses from NVIDIA's zone load balancer) instead of aborting a session that would have come up fine on the next poll; disconnects clean up the CloudMatch session server-side instead of leaking it.
• Language picker — a gear icon next to the account avatar on the catalog screen switches the UI between English and Spanish (more languages can be added under src/i18n/).

Status

Phase	Scope	State
0	Protocol research (docs/protocol-notes.md)	✅ Done
1	App skeleton: VitaSDK/cargo-vita build, SDL2 + egui loop	✅ Done
2	Authentication + game library	✅ Done
3	Signaling + CloudMatch session lifecycle	✅ Done
4	WebRTC peer, H.264 decode, gamepad input	✅ Working (Vita3K + real PS Vita hardware)
5	Audio (Opus), session resilience, UI polish	✅ Working (Vita3K + real PS Vita hardware)
6	Real-hardware validation	✅ Confirmed working on an original PS Vita

Known gaps: analog triggers/L3/R3 need a rear-touchpad mapping (the Vita has no such physical controls); the language picker only ships English/Spanish text so far, the rest of the UI outside the catalog screen is still hardcoded Spanish. Development is validated against both Vita3K (whose sceAvcdec only implements YUV420 output, handled at runtime) and real PS Vita hardware.

See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for what is reused from green-vita (MPL-2.0) and what is protocol knowledge referenced from OpenNOW.

Build requirements

• VitaSDK installed, with the VITASDK environment variable pointing at it (this project does not install VitaSDK for you).
• Rust nightly + cargo-vita:

  rustup toolchain install nightly
  cargo +nightly install cargo-vita
  rustup target add armv7-sony-vita-newlibeabihf --toolchain nightly

• pkg-config (e.g. brew install pkg-config on macOS).

Building

make vpk                                    # builds target/armv7-sony-vita-newlibeabihf/release/opennow-vita.vpk
make upload-vpk VITA_IP=192.168.0.103       # uploads the VPK to ux0:/data/ via VitaShell/vitacompanion
make update-run-vita VITA_IP=192.168.0.103  # build + update + launch in one step

Uploading requires VitaShell's FTP server or vitacompanion running on the console, on the same network as your computer. The VPK also installs and runs in the Vita3K emulator.

Project layout

.cargo/config.toml      Cross-compilation target/toolchain (armv7-sony-vita-newlibeabihf)
tools/                  vita-gcc/vita-ar/vita-pkg-config wrappers (VitaSDK)
static/sce_sys/         App metadata (icon, LiveArea) packaged into the VPK
src/
  main.rs               Entry point; Vita heap/stack sizing, CDRAM reservation
  app/                  Application state machine and egui UI
  shell/                Main loop: SDL2 window, egui painter, direct video surface
  input.rs              SDL2 event mapping (keyboard/controller/touch) + XInput snapshots
  locale.rs             Supported UI locales (currently English/Spanish)
  i18n.rs, i18n/*.ftl   Fluent-based UI translations (wired into the catalog screen so far)
  streaming/
    video/              Direct-texture video pipeline: decoder sync, sceAvcdec, decode worker
    audio.rs            Opus RTP decode + SDL2 audio playback
  gfn/
    auth.rs             NVIDIA device-code OAuth + encrypted token storage
    catalog.rs          Game library (GraphQL) + server-side search
    covers.rs           Cover-art cache with bounded async downloads
    cloudmatch.rs       Session create/poll/stop against the CloudMatch REST API
    signaling.rs        NVST WebSocket signaling (offer/answer/ICE trickle)
    sdp.rs              Offer sanitation + NVST answer blob construction
    peer.rs             Sans-I/O WebRTC peer: ICE/DTLS/SRTP, RTP → H.264 access units
    input_protocol.rs   NVST input-channel binary protocol (gamepad + heartbeat)
docs/protocol-notes.md  GFN protocol reverse-engineering notes (Phase 0)

The assets in static/sce_sys/ (icon, LiveArea backgrounds) are auto-generated solid-color placeholders — replace them with real art before distributing a VPK.

Acknowledgements

• green-vita — the direct-texture video pipeline, the Vita-patched ring/rtc-shared forks, and proof that cloud gaming on a Vita is possible at all.
• OpenNOW — the GFN protocol reference (CloudMatch, NVST signaling, and the input-channel wire format).
• MattKC's Vanilla — the single-reference-frame decoder trick.