Valve's Steam Link For Raspberry Pi Now Available

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve's Steam Link For Raspberry Pi Now Available

After being announced last week, Valve's Steam Link application for the Raspberry Pi is now officially available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Steam-Link

[Veerappan]

Figures... I bought one of the Steam Links on their closeout sale (super-cheap, so not really complaining), and now they have a free App I can install on my 3B/RetroPi anyway.

Good news is that it got me looking into how hackable the steamlink is. Turns out they make it trivially simple to enable SSH and start hacking away. It'll only boot a signed kernel, but you can get a root shell easily and it has busybox installed (i.e. chroot is available, and you can just chroot to a usb key with Arch on it). Valve's sdk github repo for steamlink even has examples including how to build RetroArch for the steamlink... So I guess I can have my choice of which system to plug in in the living room.

[markorm]

Figures... I bought one of the Steam Links on their closeout sale (super-cheap, so not really complaining), and now they have a free App I can install on my 3B/RetroPi anyway.

Good news is that it got me looking into how hackable the steamlink is. Turns out they make it trivially simple to enable SSH and start hacking away. It'll only boot a signed kernel, but you can get a root shell easily and it has busybox installed (i.e. chroot is available, and you can just chroot to a usb key with Arch on it). Valve's sdk github repo for steamlink even has examples including how to build RetroArch for the steamlink... So I guess I can have my choice of which system to plug in in the living room.

That's very f'ing cool actually.

[etam]

It'll only boot a signed kernel

Maybe ask them to unlock the bootloader? Given that the platform is abandoned, they might actually do it.

[Dunexus]

I would be curious to know how it performs compared to moonlight on RPi 3B/3B+.

[Nille]

Dunexus for me it works close to perfect (LAN Connection in both cases). Moonlight never worked for me Correct and its an Nvidia Only Tech.

But the Steamlink App has his own "problems"
If you need a over or underscan for your Display, it ignores them. If you force it with the overscan_scale=1 option in config.txt steamlink stops working because they did something wrong with the hardwaredecoder and got just a black screen while streaming.

If you use a Xbox Gamepad you had to use the xpad driver or you cant get the mapping correct. retropi for example use the xboxdrv as default.

[ayandon]

Dear Admin, pls pls do a comparison article/video.

[starshipeleven]

Figures... I bought one of the Steam Links on their closeout sale (super-cheap, so not really complaining), and now they have a free App I can install on my 3B/RetroPi anyway.

Good news is that it got me looking into how hackable the steamlink is. Turns out they make it trivially simple to enable SSH and start hacking away. It'll only boot a signed kernel, but you can get a root shell easily and it has busybox installed (i.e. chroot is available, and you can just chroot to a usb key with Arch on it). Valve's sdk github repo for steamlink even has examples including how to build RetroArch for the steamlink... So I guess I can have my choice of which system to plug in in the living room.

You can kexec from the signed kernel to your own kernel. It might not be elegant but it's confirmed working. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam_Link/...am_link_kexec/

[MaxToTheMax]

I think what Valve has done here is really smart. Designing and manufacturing a custom hardware platform like Steam Link, and then refreshing it to keep up with the times, and to keep up with parts availability, is expensive, and it takes resources. Valve probably wasn't making any margin on it anyway, nor did they ever intend to. So now they're piggybacking on an existing hardware platform, which is already widely available, and which they don't have to spend any money on R&D or manufacturing for. And they keep their cool streaming feature for Steam, which is probably the only part they cared about.

[starshipeleven]

I think what Valve has done here is really smart. Designing and manufacturing a custom hardware platform like Steam Link, and then refreshing it to keep up with the times, and to keep up with parts availability, is expensive, and it takes resources.

The only thing that could bother Steam Link is end of life/production of the SoC, and it won't happen for at least 3 years still.

It's job does not really need much hardware refreshes, as it's just a dumb client showing rendered frames on a screen (and redirecting input to the PC). All the work is done by the gaming PC.