Moonlight
Created at MHacks 2013 by Cameron Gutman, Diego Waxemberg, Aidan Campbell, Aaron Neyer, Michelle Bergeron and Andrew Hennessy, then carried forward by the Moonlight community and contributors.
Official project history →Acknowledgements
Credit is part of the architecture.
Eclipse and Umbra only exist because other people documented protocols, opened source, built clients and hosts, maintained libraries and solved the platform work first.
The foundations
Moonlight and Sunshine.
The original client and host communities made an open game-streaming ecosystem possible.
Sunshine
Originally created by @loki-47-6F-64 and now maintained and developed by LizardByte and contributors. Sunshine is the open host foundation beneath Apollo and Umbra.
Original source →Current LizardByte source →Direct lineage
The projects Eclipse and Umbra extend.
Each project contributed a distinct part of the path from an open protocol to a television client and virtual-display host.
Moonlight Embedded
Iwan Timmer and contributors created the embedded client from which the large-screen client lineage grew.
Source →Moonlight TV
Mariotaku / Ningyuan Li and contributors created the LVGL large-screen client and webOS foundation.
Source →Aurora
@GuiDev1994 and contributors built the direct Moonlight TV derivative from which Eclipse descends.
Source →Apollo
@ClassicOldSong and contributors build and maintain Apollo, the Sunshine-derived host that supplies Umbra’s everyday streaming functionality. Umbra is a minimal-change fork: it keeps Apollo’s foundation and adds what Eclipse needs for co-op.
Source →Vibepollo
Nonary and contributors build Vibepollo, an AI-enhanced version of Apollo with its own virtual display and gamepad drivers. Umbra (Vibepollo) adds the same Eclipse additions to it.
Source →KWin and Mutter
The KDE community and the GNOME project build the compositors that create Umbra’s virtual displays on Linux. Umbra’s optional HDR extras patch KWin 6.6.6 and Mutter 50.1, built from Ubuntu’s packages and the Debian packaging they derive from.
KWin source → Mutter source →SudoVDA
SudoMaker and contributors publish and maintain the virtual-display work used by the host lineage, with inherited Microsoft and VirtualDrivers components.
Source →The wider stack
Libraries, tools and platform work.
This readable index does not replace the exact licences, notices and source references shipped with a particular release.
Client and media
Moonlight Qt, moonlight-common-c, ENet, SS4S, commons-c, LVGL, libmicrodns, SDL, SDL_image, SDL-webOS, SDL_GameControllerDB, Mbed TLS, Opus, curl, Expat, FreeType, Fontconfig, inih, FFmpeg and OpenSSL.
Interface and build
Google Material Icons, Montserrat by Julieta Ulanovsky and contributors, Font Awesome Free, Unscii by Ville-Matias Heikkilä / Viznut, CMake, pbnjson, webOS OSE, webos-userland, buildroot-nc4, ThrowTheSwitch Unity, Sharp and libvips.
Host and virtual display
libdisplaydevice, shared-web, inputtino, Simple-Web-Server, ViGEmClient, nanors, tray, TPCircularBuffer, Wayland/wlr protocols, Vue, Font Awesome, Bootstrap, Boost and related projects.
Codecs and hardware APIs
FFmpeg, x264, x265, MulticoreWare HDR10+/dynamicHDR10 work, json11, SVT-AV1, Intel VPL, AMD AMF, NVIDIA codec headers and NVAPI, plus Khronos OpenCL headers.
Linux host
Flatpak, Flathub and the Freedesktop SDK runtime with PipeWire and Mesa (rusticl OpenCL); KDE output and screencast protocols by Sebastian Kügler, Méven Car, Xaver Hugl and Aleix Pol Gonzalez; the Wayland colour-management protocol; Ayatana Indicators, libdbusmenu, libnotify, libevdev, Avahi and numactl. NVIDIA CUDA, which builds the Linux host and is statically linked into it, is NVIDIA’s proprietary software.
moonlight-common-c's Reed–Solomon work credits Luigi Rizzo, Alain Knaff and Iwan Timmer, with portions derived from Phil Karn, Robert Morelos-Zaragoza and Hari Thirumoorthy. Eclipse's desktop video module also adapts work from Moonlight Qt.
Full attribution and licence record
The repository record carries direct source links, licences and component roles.
AI-assisted development. Claude and Codex are used to write and debug code and help with documentation for these forks. @PreceptorOfMagic leads orchestration, high-level design and hands-on testing, alongside community reports and contributions. This is separate from the upstream authorship credited above.
Media on this site. The demonstration clips and screens were recorded by an AI assistant (Claude) as an unattended capability test while the developer was away. The host desktops in them show Wallpaper Engine wallpapers from the Steam Workshop: “Moon Light” by Sir Crab and “KIKI&JIJI” (art credited to Ayu) by 鬥丨Dou. They remain their creators’ work and appear only as each PC’s desktop background.
If an attribution is incomplete, please open an issue with a primary source and the affected release.