Steam Up Your Raspberry Pi

YOU’LL NEED THIS

RASPBERRY PI 3

MODEL B OR B+

You’ll want the raw power of the latest Pi to make your

game streaming a reality.

VALVE’S STEAM LINK was an odd little device. Frequently discounted to just a couple of dollars, and much-maligned for producing inconsistent results, the now-discontinued black box aimed to beam your games from your desktop PC, presumably residing in a dirty corner of your home, to your living room TV. Not a new concept, certainly—you can do it with an Xbox or PlayStation, or with tech such as GeForce Go, or even Steam from PC to PC—but a damn convenient one if you have a library full of Steam games and an insatiable yearning for your couch.

Good news, then: Steam Link is dead, but long live Steam Link, now reborn as a chunk of Linux code, suitable to run on a Raspberry Pi 3. Yes, you’ll be investing more—you need a Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ ($35, plus all the other bits you require)—but once it’s hooked up, you’ll get the same effect, and there’s nothing to stop you installing other stuff on your Pi to give it a second job. RetroPi, anyone? Plex or Kodi? It’s up to you. –ALEX COX

1

PREPARE YOUR PI You absolutely need a Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ [ Image A]. We didn’t try this on a Pi Zero or a previous version of the main Raspberry Pi branch, because we weren’t feeling masochistic enough—it’s unlikely to work at all, but if that’s all you’ve got, you’re welcome to try it. You also need an Ethernet connection (we’ll come to this later on) and, at least initially, a keyboard and mouse, before you replace them with a controller. A large SD card isn’t a primary requirement (we installed on an 8GB card we had lying around), but if you want to do more with your Steam Link box, you’ll want to give yourself a little more breathing room. Lastly, don’t skimp on the power supply: You need something that puts out at least 2.5A, because if your Pi doesn’t get the relevant juice, it’ll descend into a mess of glitches—consider, also, adding a heatsink kit to your box to prevent it frying itself.

2

GET CARDED Unlike some single-use Raspberry Pi cases, there’s no special distro to install on your SD card—the Steam Link app installs and runs on top of Raspbian Stretch, the Pi’s default OS. Download the desktop version from www.raspberrypi.org and unzip it, then grab Etcher from www.balena.io to get the OS image on to your SD card. Insert the card into your reader, run Etcher [ Image B], drag and drop the ISO image on to the window, and proceed with the writing procedure, as long as you’re sure you’ve extracted everything you need from that SD card, as this is a 100 percent destructive procedure. When the write’s done, pop the card into your Raspberry Pi and boot up—it should drop you straight to Raspbian’s Pixel desktop.

3

INSTALL STEAM LINK Open up a terminal (the icon is at the top of the screen) and type sudo apt update to make sure your OS install is as current as it can be, and to ensure Raspbian’s knowledge of its repositories (the online locations it draws software from) is up to date. Then type sudo apt install steamlink to download the whole thing and install it automatically. That’s the installation process done with—you should see a Steam Link icon appear on your desktop, and the program’s ready to run. You can now either double–click that icon, or run

steamlink within the terminal window.

4

FIRST RUN If you have a controller, you can plug it in and configure it now—Steam Link on the Raspberry Pi supports Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 controllers, as well as the Steam Controller as long as you’re using the wireless dongle. We recommend going wired in order to cut out that tiny amount of latency caused by wireless links, given that you’re already going to be dealing with (at least on the Beta we tested) around 20ms network and rendering latency, and whatever your TV’s picture processing engine puts on top—depending on the TV, this could be anywhere from 6ms to 30ms, provided you’re in game mode, and far worse than that

without. Once that’s set up, you’re asked to perform a network test. If you’re connected by Wi-Fi on a standard Pi 3B—which is 2.4GHz only—this is the point where Steam Link will shout at you. On a 3B+, you may find that 5GHz networking is actually adequate for streaming, but we wholeheartedly recommend hooking up to an Ethernet connection, both on your Raspberry Pi and the PC you’re streaming from. The latency is lower, the speed is generally higher, and there’s far less chance of interference causing you to drop frames.

5 CONNECT TO STEAM

Now it’s time to select which Steam-running PC you want to connect to; if you’re given no options at this stage, boot up your PC, and run Steam. We’d have thought that was pretty obvious. Note down the PIN given to you by Steam Link, then head back to your PC, and enter it in the box that’s popped up [ Image C]. All being well, your PC will jump into Steam’s Big Picture mode and, returning to your Raspberry Pi, you’ll see its screen duplicated, and the menu should be controllable by whatever input device you have hooked up to the Raspberry Pi. Bad news if you were hoping to use your PC for something else while others game, because that isn’t how Steam Link works; it locks up your main machine for the whole time you’re streaming, in the same way as Steam’s standard In-home Streaming mode does.

6 BETTER CONNECTIONS

As they say, your results may vary. It’s entirely possible that your network holds up well and your Steam Link experience is positive. Don’t count on it, though—these things don’t always work as planned. There are ways to get better results beyond using a wired connection. Dig around your network and stop those upload-heavy peer-to-peer connections that you definitely don’t have running; delve into your router’s settings and, if possible, assign some priority to the machines on either end of your Steam Link equation, using QoS management tools; close whatever you can on the PC you’re linking to, in order to give it the maximum resources to render your stream. This can include Nvidia hardware encoding—you might want to turn off ShadowPlay and Gamestream, because these can actually make Steam’s encoding worse.

7 STEAM SETTINGS

Steam itself can be configured to make a decent difference to streaming. Tweaking your connection’s settings to drop a little graphical fidelity is highly advised—on your Pi, head to the cog icon, select “In-Home Streaming,” and opt for “Fast” or “Balanced” if the Beautiful mode is glitching out [ Image D]. On your host PC, select “Steam > Settings > In Home Streaming > Advanced Host Options” [ Image E], and try flicking some of the switches there. Don’t forget to set your game to the lowest resolution you find acceptable. From your couch, 720p won’t seem so painful.