so Steam Link my beautiful beautiful Steam Link, that lets you stream games
from your gaming machine down to any display with the HDMI, port is being
discontinued. Well the good news is that Valve, even though they're not going to
make the hardware anymore, they're gonna keep working on that software and make
it available for free. One of the easiest ways to get that going is with
the Raspberry Pi so today I'm gonna show you how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a
Steam Link. So here we go! So because I know I'll
get questions about it I'm using a Raspberry Pi bundle in this video it's
called the Cana Kit gives you the Raspberry Pi the case of power
everything you need to get going I'll put a link down in the description that
it'll take you to that and as of going through this tutorial if you think any
questions please feel free to leave those in the comment section below and
with all that out of the way let's get right to it so the first thing you're
gonna need is a micro SD card that goes in the Raspberry Pi once you get that
loading into your card reader stick it into your computer and then we'll jump
in and do the rest of this alright so here we are in the desktop and I'm gonna
be doing this in Linux but the process is exactly the same in Linux, Mac or
Windows so it doesn't matter what operating system you're on you're gonna
use all the same software and everything so after we insert the SD card into the
computer that we're gonna need a few pieces of software the first one is
Raspian Stretch now this is the operating system that we're gonna be
loading onto that SD card to boot up the Raspberry Pi and if you're familiar with
this grab whatever version you want if you're not familiar with it
just grab this one with the recommended software it has everything you need on
there it's a little bit more bloated than what you need but it'll just get
you up and going and be kind of painless so either download the zip directly or
download through torrent the torrent you're gonna get it a little bit faster
but it's exactly the same and then when you download it you'll get this recipe
and stretch full zip go ahead and extract that and when you extract it
you'll get the .IMG file so that part's done next part we need to get
Etcher. If you don't have it already go out to
the site I'll put this site and the site actually everything I talked about I'll
put in the description but go out to here download
at your this is just a free image writing program so once you have those
two things go ahead and start up Etcher and we're gonna go and select that IMG
file so it's right here but I'm just going to navigate to my downloads folder
an image that's where it's going to be on your system most likely or wherever
you extracted that IMG open that up select your drive and continue now just
flash it if the prompt you for a password go ahead and enter it and this
is gonna take a few minutes but it'll write everything you need onto that SD
card to boot up your Raspberry Pi. So while this is going I want to talk about
this other tab that I have open here and this is to actually install steam link
after we get the Raspberry Pi up and going so we're not going to do that on
this machine but we're gonna run these commands after we get the Raspberry Pi
all set up and this will load steam link onto our Raspberry Pi
alright so now etchers done and that image is written to the SD card all we
need to do now is take that out of the computer put it into the Raspberry Pi
and fire it up alright so here we are in the Raspberry Pi you this is the
raspbian OS now when you first start up your Raspberry Pi it's gonna take a
really really really long time so just be patient it'll eventually come up to
this screen and then we're just going to go through these settings real quick now
at this point if you're using an ethernet cable which if you're doing
this game streaming you probably should you're gonna get better performance you
won't have to do this but obviously I'm not using that right now so I need to
select my wireless network you can still do this off the wireless network it's
just gonna work better off of Wired so if you get this message asking you to
update the software go ahead and do that now this will just download updates from
the internet and apply them to your system this will take just another few
minutes as well alright so we are all updated rebooted and ready to go so this
is the fun part now we use those commands that we looked at earlier so
we're going to type sudo apt update so next thing we're going to do is sudo apt
install steam link so that is all downloaded and everything so now we just
launch steam link
and it's automatically going out and getting all those updates so here we are
now we're in steam link we can go through the get started menu Here I am
using just a generic wired xbox360 controller and I'm gonna select pair
another controller the one on the left is my laptop and the one on the right is
my gaming machine so I'm gonna select that and then on the machine you have to
enter in this code there'll be a little pop-up that comes up you enter in that
code and everything syncs up for you
okay so there we go we made the connection and it did a network test and
since I'm on the wireless it found some issues so there's kind of high latency
there's no frame loss but might have some problems with the wireless so we're
all connected we can go ahead and click on start playing it'll connect to my
gaming machine alright so here we are in steam link I'm just using the 360
controller to navigate through the menus here and we'll go into library and let's
launch up a game real quick and try it out again these are all playing on my
gaming machine and streaming to the Raspberry Pi through the steam link
software
you
so here we go even over a 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi you can see that it still works
really really well it's pretty it's smooth I'm not getting any lag right now
the controls are very very responsive if you're seeing any lag it's probably
because I'm recording this at 24 frames per second so keep that in mind but on
my screen it is completely lag free and extremely playable and then if you want
even better performance you can hook up the wired connection and you know you'll
get a little less latency than you will over the Wi-Fi now if you ever want to
get out of steam link and get back to the raspbian OS it's super easy to do so
you just come back up here hit the little power thing and stop streaming
and this will dump you right back to the desktop and that's it anytime you want
to launch into steam link you just start up your Raspberry Pi type in steam link
and you're off and running now there are ways to auto start steam link when you
start up your Raspberry Pi those are a little more complicated and a little
beyond the scope of this video but if you want to see that I'm happy to make a
video on it just let me know down in the comment section alright so that's all
there is to it as you can see it is super easy to turn your Raspberry Pi
into a Steam Link, again if you have any questions or comments leave those in the
comments section below if you found this useful and informative please hit the
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these videos thanks so much for stopping by and I will see you in the next one