Stream PC games to your TV
Why spend hundreds of quid on a Steam Machine when you can do exactly the same thing with a humble Raspberry Pi? (The B+ is available for $25, which is about £16, at RS Components at the moment, if you’re really on a budget.)
Here are the Possibly Unsafe guys to walk you through setup.
I’ve swiped the instructions below from their YouTube channel:
Setup:
You’ll first need to install the latest Rasbian from here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/Next download Limelight Embedded. Grab the latest limelight.jar and libopus.so from here:
https://github.com/irtimmer/limelight…Make sure that your gaming PC has an NVIDIA GTX 600+ graphics card and GeForce Experience installed.
Pairing:
To make things easier, enable SSH on the RPi and tunnel in to the machine. Here are some useful commands:List compatible PCs
java -jar limelight.jar listPair with PC
java -jar limelight.jar pair PC-IPMap a controller
java -jar limelight.jar map -input /dev/input/eventX mapfile.mapStart streaming
java -jar limelight.jar stream -1080/720 -60fps/30fps PC-IP -app Steam -mapping mapfile.mapMake sure to check the Limelight help file in case things have changed since this post!
Possibly Unsafe’s a rather brilliant channel; I’m making their homemade Sriracha chilli sauce just as soon as I can get my hands on enough habaneros. You can support them via their Patreon if you like the things they do.
29 comments
jose
geforce experience is still windows only, correct? no linux love i guess
ric96
Only if i had a nvidia card….*sigh*
ric96
great project btw
paddy
Excellent, wacky sense of humour. And ‘possibly unsafe’ is a philosophy to which everyone should aspire.
laurent
What should we answer now at the question : “does it runs Far Cry ?”
Robbi373
If your PC does, you can of course stream FC4. I did it, and it worked with my F710 gamepad :D
t1
way better than that steam link… hopefully steam will run on a 2012 iMac… i have two first-gen model bs (i only use one, i use both a rasbian and a kano os sd card for my pi)
Martin
I’ve tried this myself both with a pi B and pi2 B, works really good (the pi B had som trouble with frame rates dropping when I used more than 1 controller as the processor needed to do some more work, but that is solved now with the pi2!).
J Alway
This is a somewhat useful thing, but I could never figure out why you couldn’t just be playing it on your computer. Am I the only person who has a 32″ TV for the living room and a 32″ TV for my Computer in the “office”?
Neil
Indeed, or just connect the HDMI from your computer to the TV – I must be “Gen A” because I just don’t get it.
Kratos
GREAT!!
D Buckle
I’ve gotta try this! Question, will streaming work through composite, or is it restricted to HDMI?
HIYgamer
I have one question about this. They mention a gaming pc at one point. Do you need a gaming pc in order to use this?
Charles
Well, the Raspberry Pi only acts as a stream receiver – you need a computer capable of running the game in the first place, and having the necessary hardware. That is what they’re referring to as a “gaming PC”.
John Bovi
Is there a way of doing this that might work for AMD, or have they not developed an API for that kind of shenanigans?
Rajel
This uses the nVidia GeForce Experience drivers, so it’s limited to nVidia.
Not really even limited to Steam games, as such – this doesn’t use Steam’s in-home streaming.
James
Im getting HUGE latency using a wireless hub. Any suggestions? If I set the bitrate what should it be?
Josh
Assuming you are using the 2.4GHz band, moving to 5GHz will probably help you more than anything. Less congestions there, so less battling for airtime.
D Buckle
So, something im wondering, The GeForce Experience app can stream google chrome to the raspberry pi, however when i try to use a service like youtube, there is no sound, does anyone know why this is?
Barack Obama
My computer does not have a good enough graphics card for this. Is there any other way to run Steam on a Raspberry Pi?
Geff
What’s the Radeon Equivalent???
Colin
All the typing in the commands is unnecessary. If you just have1 GeForce streaming computer on your network the following command will set you up.
java -jar limelight.jar stream
Everything else is just tweaking.
Mike Redrobe
This also works for streaming netflix to the pi…
alex
There’s a new version of Limelight now called moonlight. it no longer uses the .so and .jar file download. How do we install the new version?
Luke
Hey Alex
I left a comment on GitHub asking how the install package works, but I never had a reply (I’m useless with Linux).
Instead, I found another walkthrough that I used and got working perfectly.
http://www.howtogeek.com/220969/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-steam-machine-with-moonlight/
Hope that helps. Luke
John
Why do you need to use limelight? Can’t you just install Steam and use Steam’s native in-home streaming?
gonz
There is no steam client for the raspberry pi.
Terion
A rather useless system, since I don’t have the right NVIDIA card, nor do I run Windows on my game PC. I’m still looking for a good way to do this on a Raspberry Pi. Otherwise I’ll probably buy a low power board (like the RPi) but with the Intel x86 architecture, so I can run Steam on it. Or I’ll buy a HDMI over IP set + and USB over IP set and use those to make a dedicated set-up for one game-pc to one client.
Terion
I am currently looking into GamingAnywhere: http://gaminganywhere.org/
Since it’s OSS, I can compile it on the Raspberry Pi and on my Debian machine. The compilation doesn’t work out of the box though, so I have to mess around with it a bit. So far the dependencies that wouldn’t compile could be installed directly from the Debian/Raspbian repos.