So, you’re going out of town on vacation and you’re not looking forward to going through Xbox withdrawal? It would be silly to pack up your whole Xbox One with all its gear and bring it with you, right? What if you can just bring your laptop and an Xbox One controller? Now you can!

On July 17th, Microsoft finally made it’s Xbox One to Windows 10 streaming feature available to the public (instead of having to be invited to the Xbox Preview program). The feature lets you use the Xbox app on Windows 10 to connect to your Xbox One over your local network and stream its video to the app.

In this guide, I’ll show you how you can take this functionality to the next level of awesomeness by opening it up to stream Xbox One to Windows 10 over the Internet instead of being confined to your local network.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Xbox One

PC with Windows 10

Access to configure your home’s router (college campuses are out of luck)

Let’s get started!

Test Streaming on your Local Network

Before we do anything else, make sure you can stream Xbox One to Windows 10 on your local network.

Make sure the feature is enabled on your Xbox One in Settings > Preferences > Allow game streaming to other devices (beta).

Then, on your Windows 10 PC that is connect to the same network, open the Xbox app, go to Connect / Connected on the left sidebar, and click the “Stream” or “Test streaming” button.

If all is working fine so far, then continue with the next steps.

Setup Some Port Forwarding Rules on your Router

Big thanks to the good folks at Reddit for suggesting some ports and port ranges that opened the connection to stream Xbox One to Windows 10 from outside the home network. A few people suggested some different combinations or ports, so I added all of them to make sure I could get it to work.

The bottom 3 rules shows below are the for this Xbox Streaming feature. You can ignore the top 3 for this guide since those are for some of my other posts about how to remotely control Kodi with Yatse using port forwarding and how to sync Genesis TV & movie libraries across multiple Kodi HTPCs.

In my example, I’m using a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite (which is the best router for a geek’s home network in my opinion). But any router will have the ability to setup port forwarding, so this applies anywhere. The interface will just look different.

So the 3 port forwarding rules you need to add are…

5050

4838

49000-65000

If your router doesn’t seem to support the IP range with a dash, try and enter it like “49000:65000”.

I left the protocols set to “Both” to include both TCP and UDP, however I’m not sure if I actually need both. But again, I just wanted to get it to work.

For each of those port forwarding rules, you will need to specify the internal IP address of your Xbox One in the “Forward-to address” field.

Make sure your Xbox One uses a static IP address or you use a DHCP reservation for your Xbox One on your router. That makes your router assign the same IP address each time instead of assigning new random IP addresses. If the Xbox One IP address changes, then streaming would break and you would have to go into your router to update these port forwarding rules. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Use Dynamic DNS to Know Your Home’s IP Address

Now that you have port forwarding setup, you will need to know what IP address your house is using in order to connect to your Xbox One remotely.

Note: This section is optional. The idea is just to figure out what your home’s IP address is when you’re away from home. If you are home, you can just Google search “ip” and it will tell you your home’s external IP address. That’s all you need. If you have a remote access client like TeamViewer installed, then you can login to your computer from anywhere and do the Google search. Otherwise, read on for instructions on how to use a Dynamic DNS host name.

There are many ways you could do this, but what I have done is setup a free dynamic DNS service with afraid.org setup my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite with access to that account so it can automatically report an IP address change to afraid.org which will update the DNS on my dynamic DNS sub-domain.

If your router doesn’t have a dynamic DNS feature, you can always use No-IP instead of afraid.org and you can download their No-IP desktop client which will run in the background and report your home’s external IP address back to No-IP.

Tip: If you don’t want to remember your dynamic DNS host domain and you own your own domain, you can create a CNAME record at your own domain to have sub-domain of your choice point to your dynamic DNS address.

Once your dynamic DNS is setup, open Windows Command Prompt on your remote Windows 10 PC by searching the start menu for “cmd”. In the black command prompt window, type “ping your.dynamicdns-address.com”. To be clear, you type the word ping and then hit space and then type your dynamic DNS address and hit Enter. It will then show you the IP address of your home.

The reason why you will have to ping your dynamic DNS address instead of just using that address in the Xbox app is that the Xbox app will only accept and IP address and will not let you enter a domain or sub-domain.

Enjoy Xbox One Gaming on the Go!

You’ve probably guessed by now that the final step is to open the Xbox app on your remote Windows 10 PC, go to the Connect / Connected page and type your home’s IP address in the box labeled “Xbox One not listed? Enter your console’s IP address:” and click the Connect button.

If all goes well, you should be streaming your Xbox One to your Windows 10 PC in no time!

Things to Keep in Mind

Bandwidth

Xbox One to Windows 10 streaming uses about 9 mbps of bandwidth which means the upload speeds of your home Internet access should be higher than that. Usually residential Internet access has download speeds much higher than upload speeds, so you may want to check on that.

There is a quality setting that you can change between low, medium, and high, so if you have bandwidth issues, try a lower quality setting.

Some Xbox One Apps Don’t Allow Streaming

Just so you know, some apps on the Xbox One don’t allow streaming to PC. One example is Netflix. If you try to stream Netflix to your PC from your Xbox, it will tell you that you’re not allowed to do that.

That example is fine because why would you want to do that? There is a Netflix app on Windows 10 anyway. But, can’t help but wonder what other apps may have streaming disabled?

Turn on the Xbox One Remotely

I haven’t figured out how to enable the “Turn on” feature yet when access remotely . It uses some magic packet to do Wake on LAN (WOL) which apparently can’t be forwarded through a router . If anyone figures out how to do this, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE 9/12/2015: Someone named Schamper on Reddit posted a Python script that he wrote that will remotely turn on your Xbox One. All it needs is your public IP, port 5050 forwarded to your Xbox One, and secret code called the “LiveID” found in your Xbox One console settings area. Several people in the thread have asked to use the script to start developing it into websites and apps, so I expect this kind of thing will start appearing soon. Thanks, Jimmy Lee, for the tip in the comments!

UPDATE 1/24/2016: There is now a Windows 10 app in the Windows App Store called “Xoon” which is a remote app for the Xbox One and it works to turn the Xbox One on and off remotely. Thanks, justme, for the tip in the comments!

Other workarounds for remotely turning on the Xbox One include:

RDP / TeamViewer into a Windows 10 PC in your home that is always on and use its Xbox app to turn on the Xbox One.

Have an answering machine next to the Xbox so you can call the phone and leave a message saying “Xbox on”.

Use some notification messaging service to make an old Android phone speak “Xbox on” next to the Xbox. I could probably use Tasker and AutoRemote for this.

Other Methods

As someone mentioned in a community question, opening these ports could possibly grant someone access to your Xbox One if they know what your home IP address is. If you passcode protect your Xbox account, there’s not a whole lot they could do, but there is some risk there.

NOTE: Commenter, Echo Zulu, reported that they set a passcode, but that locked themselves out after they set off on a trip because you can’t enter the passcode remotely. So, you might want to avoid that.

Also, Mina shared a suggestion in the comments that a VPN is a good solution. If your router has VPN capabilities, then you can remotely connect to your home’s LAN through a VPN. This also enables the Wake on LAN feature so you can turn the Xbox on using the Xbox app in Windows 10. Plus, there is a security benefit with the VPN solution. Thanks for your suggestion, Mina!

Your Thoughts?

Having issues? Have a suggestion on how to make this work better? Please let me know in the comments below or Ask a Question.