Turn A Raspberry Pi Into A Steam Link Device - Stream Steam Games to The Pi

Setting Up Steam Link on Raspberry Pi

The first step is to set up the Raspberry Pi by closing down any open terminal windows and navigating back to the Raspberry Pi logo. From there, select the "Preferences" option from the menu, followed by "Raspberry Pi Configuration". In this section, make sure that the "Network" tab is checked, as this will ensure that the Steam Link app can connect to the internet before the desktop even loads.

Next, set the GPU memory to 256. This will increase the performance of the Steam Link app and prevent any errors when launching the app. Click "OK" to save these changes and reboot the Raspberry Pi one more time.

After rebooting, open up another terminal window and type in the command `sudo nano etc/xdg/lx-session.config`. Use your arrow keys to navigate down to the bottom of the file and add the line `SteamLink=true` followed by a space. Then press "Control X" to exit the editor and save the changes. When prompted to save, select "yes" and then press "Enter".

This will ensure that the Steam Link app starts automatically when the Raspberry Pi boots up. To verify this, reboot the Raspberry Pi again and wait for it to load the desktop. At this point, the Steam Link app should launch without any issues.

To test this setup, move over to a gaming PC with Steam installed and enable in-home streaming on that machine as well. Connect to the same network as the Raspberry Pi and start up Steam Link on the Pi. The app should detect the connected computer and prompt you to enter a code. Enter the code from the gaming PC into the Steam Link app, and it should test the network speed.

The Steam Link app can also be customized with settings such as computer controller streaming, video streaming, audio streaming, input streaming, and streaming quality. The recommended setting is "Balance", but users can experiment with different options to find what works best for their setup.

To exit the game on the gaming PC and return to the desktop, press "Escape" a few times until the Steam Link app disappears. Then, select the "Power Icon" option to shut down or restart the system. The Raspberry Pi will automatically start the Steam Link app when it boots up again.

Streaming Games from Gaming PC to Raspberry Pi

To stream games from a gaming PC to a Raspberry Pi, launch the Steam client on the gaming machine and enable in-home streaming. Move over to the Raspberry Pi and open up Steam Link on the device. The app should detect the connected computer and prompt you to enter a code.

Enter the code from the gaming PC into the Steam Link app, and it will test the network speed. If everything checks out, click "Start Streaming" to begin playing games on the Raspberry Pi.

The recommended method of streaming is using an Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi, as this provides a more stable experience. The Raspberry Pi should be connected to the same network as the gaming PC using Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the cta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to create an awesome little steam link using a raspberry pi 3b plus or raspberry pi 3 a plus now i do recommend using the plus versions because they do have ac wi-fi and sudo gigabit ethernet it's not quite gigabit but it's much faster than the older raspberry pi 3 or the raspberry pi 2s now you can get a full kit like this on amazon for around 50 to 60 i'll leave links in the description but if you just want to piece it together you're going to need a 2.5 amp 5 volt power supply this is micro usb the raspberry pi an sd card preferably 16 gigabyte or larger eight will work if you're in a pinch and an hdmi cable a lot of the kits you'll find on amazon will also come with these small heat sinks that go on your cpu you're also going to need a keyboard and mouse for the raspberry pi now this is how we're going to control our pc games that are being streamed from our gaming pc this also works with controllers either the steam controller which is a bit expensive right now an xbox 360 or xbox one s wired controller or my personal favorite for the pi a ps4 controller because it connects over bluetooth without any setup and finally the most important thing you're going to need a gaming pc that we can stream from we're not going to be running any of these games on the raspberry pi it's all going to be streaming from our gaming pc this one here has an i5 9600k clocked at 5.1 gigahertz with an rtx 2080 ti now obviously you don't need something this expensive but as long as your pc can run some steam games we can stream those to the raspberry pi and this works out really well for me and i know it will for a lot of other people this pc here is heavy it sits up in my office it's on the third floor sometimes i'm downstairs i don't want to play my pc games so i have a raspberry pi setup down there with steam link on it so all i have to do is boot that up and start streaming my games downstairs to my raspberry pi running the steam link app there's a few other accessories you can pick up for your raspberry pi like this awesome flirt case this is an all-aluminum case and it works as a heat sink for the cpu on the raspberry pi they have the kodi edition which i have here and the silver edition available on amazon i'll leave links for everything mentioned in the description now in this video i'm going to show you how to set this up in raspbian and we're going to set it up so every time we turn our raspberry pi on it boots directly into the steam link app so we don't have to go through any other settings it just goes right into steam link and we can start streaming from there okay so let's go ahead and get this set up first thing we need to do is insert our sd card into our pc we're going to be flashing from as you can see i have the 32 gigabyte sd right here next thing we need to grab is the raspbian image i'm just going to go with raspbian stretch with desktop and recommended software i'm going to download the zip it's about two gigs so give it some time to finish while that's downloading we need to download an application that will allow us to flash this to the sd card we're going to be using etcher this is available for mac windows or linux i'm just going to be grabbing the windows 64-bit portable version when both of these are finished downloading i'm going to place them on my desktop for easy access give it a little time okay so now i have the raspbian image downloaded and i also have etcher on my desktop i'm just going to go ahead and start up etcher from within etcher we're going to select image now we're going to go for that image we just downloaded the raspbian it's on my desktop you can extract this if you want but etcher is going to take care of it for us anyway double click from here we can change the sd card we want to flash to make sure you're flashing to the correct sd and click flash this is going to install raspbian to the sd card when this is finished we can remove the sd card from our pc move over to the raspberry pi plug everything in and boot it up the card is finished flashing we're going to move over to the raspberry pi plug in the sd card power and our keyboard and we're going to boot it up so now we're here at the raspbian desktop it's just going to walk you through setting everything up i'm going to click next i'm in the united states language you can change your time zone from here if you'd like to go with new york use us keyboard next from here you can change the master password i'm just going to click next and next it's now going to search for a wi-fi network i'm going to connect to my network you can update the software from here and i do recommend doing it but we'll have to reboot one time when it's done now it's time to install steam link we're also going to set it up so it automatically boots in the steam link when we start the raspberry pi app we're going to open up the terminal up here in the very top left hand corner or you can press ctrl alt t on your keyboard from within the terminal we're going to run a quick update sudo apt get update now we're going to install the steam link application sudo apt install steam link we now have steam link installed if we go up to the top left hand corner where the little raspberry is we're going to go to games and steam link is located right here we can place it on our desktop and you can start it right now i'm just going to double click the best thing about running this in raspbian is it's going to self update every time you start it well it'll look for an update and if there is one it'll pull it down and install it get started we can set up our controller or we can just use our keyboard now i'm going to press escape because we want to set this up so it starts up every time we start this raspberry pi up i'm going to close this terminal window down we're going to head back over to the little raspberry pi logo all the way down to preferences raspberry pi configuration from here network app boot we want to make sure that this is checked performance i'm going to set this to 256. this is the gpu memory so we've just upped the gpu memory and we're going to wait for network so before the desktop even starts up it'll connect to the network and we want this because every time the steam link app starts up it's going to look for an update for the steam link app if we don't have this on it's going to give us an error right before it starts up and it won't go automatically so we want this on we're going to click ok we're going to have to reboot one more time the last thing we need to do is make sure the steam link app starts up when we boot the system so we're going to open up another terminal and from within the terminal we're going to type in sudo nano etc xdg lx session lxd pi auto start press enter we're going to use our arrow keys on our keyboard to navigate all the way down to below point rpi and type in steam link press control x do we want to save yes so we're going to press y and now we're going to press enter we can now close the terminal down every time we start this raspberry pi up it's automatically going to start the steam link app for us i'm going to demonstrate it now i'm going to reboot we'll see the desktop for a split second and then the steam link app will start no computers found and that's because i don't have steam up and running on my gaming pc we're going to move over there real quick we're going to start up steam and enable in-home streaming all right so here we are at my gaming machine got steam launched here i'm going to go up to steam settings in home streaming enable streaming i'm going to click ok now when we go back to the raspberry pi and start up steam link it's going to detect this computer on my network it's going to give me a code i'm going to have to go back to this pc and enter that code it's going to prompt me that i need to enter it all right so i'm back at the pi got my gaming pc set up i'm just going to click rescan it's going to find that computer i just turned in home streaming on with it's going to give me a code i need to move over to that pc put this code in i'm going to do that real quick now it's going to test the network speed for some reason with the new releases of steam link you're going to get zero megabits per second but the test is successful i have fast enough internet to do this i'm going to be using my keyboard here but if you want to use a ps4 controller you can connect it through the raspbian bluetooth just go right up here add device put it in pairing mode and pair it from here i'm going to go back to steam link there are some settings that we can mess around with computer controller streaming video streaming enabled audio streaming input streaming streaming quality i usually choose balance but you could go fast go back start playing i'm now streaming my main gaming machine to my raspberry pi i'm gonna go to library and we'll just start doom and here it is so this is all running on my gaming machine i'm just streaming the image to the raspberry pi in that machine i have an i5 9600k and an rtx 2080 ti we can only do 60 fps with this streaming setup in the pi but overall works really well as long as you have a decent connection like i mentioned at the beginning i do recommend using ethernet instead of wi-fi you're just going to have a better experience with that to exit just exit the game like you would normally exit to desktop it's going to bring us back into the steam link app and we can press escape a couple times to get back to the main menu we hit this little power icon we can turn the system off restart suspend system or stop streaming when we're done press escape it'll bring us back to the raspbian desktop that's pretty much it for this video guys i really appreciate you watching i'm going to leave amazon links for everything i used in this video i'm also gonna leave a few links to the steam community page where they created this they got a lot of information over there if you're running into any issues somebody might be able to help and if you can't find help there just let me know in the comments below be really cool if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys the cta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to create an awesome little steam link using a raspberry pi 3b plus or raspberry pi 3 a plus now i do recommend using the plus versions because they do have ac wi-fi and sudo gigabit ethernet it's not quite gigabit but it's much faster than the older raspberry pi 3 or the raspberry pi 2s now you can get a full kit like this on amazon for around 50 to 60 i'll leave links in the description but if you just want to piece it together you're going to need a 2.5 amp 5 volt power supply this is micro usb the raspberry pi an sd card preferably 16 gigabyte or larger eight will work if you're in a pinch and an hdmi cable a lot of the kits you'll find on amazon will also come with these small heat sinks that go on your cpu you're also going to need a keyboard and mouse for the raspberry pi now this is how we're going to control our pc games that are being streamed from our gaming pc this also works with controllers either the steam controller which is a bit expensive right now an xbox 360 or xbox one s wired controller or my personal favorite for the pi a ps4 controller because it connects over bluetooth without any setup and finally the most important thing you're going to need a gaming pc that we can stream from we're not going to be running any of these games on the raspberry pi it's all going to be streaming from our gaming pc this one here has an i5 9600k clocked at 5.1 gigahertz with an rtx 2080 ti now obviously you don't need something this expensive but as long as your pc can run some steam games we can stream those to the raspberry pi and this works out really well for me and i know it will for a lot of other people this pc here is heavy it sits up in my office it's on the third floor sometimes i'm downstairs i don't want to play my pc games so i have a raspberry pi setup down there with steam link on it so all i have to do is boot that up and start streaming my games downstairs to my raspberry pi running the steam link app there's a few other accessories you can pick up for your raspberry pi like this awesome flirt case this is an all-aluminum case and it works as a heat sink for the cpu on the raspberry pi they have the kodi edition which i have here and the silver edition available on amazon i'll leave links for everything mentioned in the description now in this video i'm going to show you how to set this up in raspbian and we're going to set it up so every time we turn our raspberry pi on it boots directly into the steam link app so we don't have to go through any other settings it just goes right into steam link and we can start streaming from there okay so let's go ahead and get this set up first thing we need to do is insert our sd card into our pc we're going to be flashing from as you can see i have the 32 gigabyte sd right here next thing we need to grab is the raspbian image i'm just going to go with raspbian stretch with desktop and recommended software i'm going to download the zip it's about two gigs so give it some time to finish while that's downloading we need to download an application that will allow us to flash this to the sd card we're going to be using etcher this is available for mac windows or linux i'm just going to be grabbing the windows 64-bit portable version when both of these are finished downloading i'm going to place them on my desktop for easy access give it a little time okay so now i have the raspbian image downloaded and i also have etcher on my desktop i'm just going to go ahead and start up etcher from within etcher we're going to select image now we're going to go for that image we just downloaded the raspbian it's on my desktop you can extract this if you want but etcher is going to take care of it for us anyway double click from here we can change the sd card we want to flash to make sure you're flashing to the correct sd and click flash this is going to install raspbian to the sd card when this is finished we can remove the sd card from our pc move over to the raspberry pi plug everything in and boot it up the card is finished flashing we're going to move over to the raspberry pi plug in the sd card power and our keyboard and we're going to boot it up so now we're here at the raspbian desktop it's just going to walk you through setting everything up i'm going to click next i'm in the united states language you can change your time zone from here if you'd like to go with new york use us keyboard next from here you can change the master password i'm just going to click next and next it's now going to search for a wi-fi network i'm going to connect to my network you can update the software from here and i do recommend doing it but we'll have to reboot one time when it's done now it's time to install steam link we're also going to set it up so it automatically boots in the steam link when we start the raspberry pi app we're going to open up the terminal up here in the very top left hand corner or you can press ctrl alt t on your keyboard from within the terminal we're going to run a quick update sudo apt get update now we're going to install the steam link application sudo apt install steam link we now have steam link installed if we go up to the top left hand corner where the little raspberry is we're going to go to games and steam link is located right here we can place it on our desktop and you can start it right now i'm just going to double click the best thing about running this in raspbian is it's going to self update every time you start it well it'll look for an update and if there is one it'll pull it down and install it get started we can set up our controller or we can just use our keyboard now i'm going to press escape because we want to set this up so it starts up every time we start this raspberry pi up i'm going to close this terminal window down we're going to head back over to the little raspberry pi logo all the way down to preferences raspberry pi configuration from here network app boot we want to make sure that this is checked performance i'm going to set this to 256. this is the gpu memory so we've just upped the gpu memory and we're going to wait for network so before the desktop even starts up it'll connect to the network and we want this because every time the steam link app starts up it's going to look for an update for the steam link app if we don't have this on it's going to give us an error right before it starts up and it won't go automatically so we want this on we're going to click ok we're going to have to reboot one more time the last thing we need to do is make sure the steam link app starts up when we boot the system so we're going to open up another terminal and from within the terminal we're going to type in sudo nano etc xdg lx session lxd pi auto start press enter we're going to use our arrow keys on our keyboard to navigate all the way down to below point rpi and type in steam link press control x do we want to save yes so we're going to press y and now we're going to press enter we can now close the terminal down every time we start this raspberry pi up it's automatically going to start the steam link app for us i'm going to demonstrate it now i'm going to reboot we'll see the desktop for a split second and then the steam link app will start no computers found and that's because i don't have steam up and running on my gaming pc we're going to move over there real quick we're going to start up steam and enable in-home streaming all right so here we are at my gaming machine got steam launched here i'm going to go up to steam settings in home streaming enable streaming i'm going to click ok now when we go back to the raspberry pi and start up steam link it's going to detect this computer on my network it's going to give me a code i'm going to have to go back to this pc and enter that code it's going to prompt me that i need to enter it all right so i'm back at the pi got my gaming pc set up i'm just going to click rescan it's going to find that computer i just turned in home streaming on with it's going to give me a code i need to move over to that pc put this code in i'm going to do that real quick now it's going to test the network speed for some reason with the new releases of steam link you're going to get zero megabits per second but the test is successful i have fast enough internet to do this i'm going to be using my keyboard here but if you want to use a ps4 controller you can connect it through the raspbian bluetooth just go right up here add device put it in pairing mode and pair it from here i'm going to go back to steam link there are some settings that we can mess around with computer controller streaming video streaming enabled audio streaming input streaming streaming quality i usually choose balance but you could go fast go back start playing i'm now streaming my main gaming machine to my raspberry pi i'm gonna go to library and we'll just start doom and here it is so this is all running on my gaming machine i'm just streaming the image to the raspberry pi in that machine i have an i5 9600k and an rtx 2080 ti we can only do 60 fps with this streaming setup in the pi but overall works really well as long as you have a decent connection like i mentioned at the beginning i do recommend using ethernet instead of wi-fi you're just going to have a better experience with that to exit just exit the game like you would normally exit to desktop it's going to bring us back into the steam link app and we can press escape a couple times to get back to the main menu we hit this little power icon we can turn the system off restart suspend system or stop streaming when we're done press escape it'll bring us back to the raspbian desktop that's pretty much it for this video guys i really appreciate you watching i'm going to leave amazon links for everything i used in this video i'm also gonna leave a few links to the steam community page where they created this they got a lot of information over there if you're running into any issues somebody might be able to help and if you can't find help there just let me know in the comments below be really cool if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel like always thanks for watching you\n"