Valve may have discontinued its Steam Link device that lets you stream games from your PC to your TV, but the company still offers software that lest you do the same thing.

The Steam Link Android app lets you stream PC games to a phone, tablet, or Android TV, for example. And now there’s another option: you can install Steam Link beta software on a Raspberry Pi.

Basically Valve has made a version of its Steam Link software that’s optimized for the line of small, cheap, and low-power computers.

The Steam Link app should run on the Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 3 B+ computers using the Raspbian Stretch operating system. Theoretically that means it may work on other computers with 64-bit ARM processors and an operating system based on Debian 9.

Since a Raspberry Pi is priced at just $35, this solution is actually cheaper than paying full price for a Steam Link device. They had a list price of $50, although they were frequently available at discount prices.

Raspberry Pi computers also have the advantage of being multi-purpose devices. In addition to working a Steam Link, you could install Kodi or Plex to use a Raspberry Pi as a media center PC, RetroPi to play classic games, or a wide range of other software for web surfing, coding, and more.

On the other hand, Steam Link for Raspberry Pi is still beta software, so there’s a chance it may be buggier than using dedicated hardware for the same purpose.

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4 replies on “Build your own Steam Link game streamer with a Raspberry Pi”

  1. Installed quickly, uses hardly any storage space and paired with no problems. Big picture screen flashes all the time. Completely unusable for me. Good news is had it worked well I probably would have crapped myself.

    1. Got it working. First time was at 1920×1200, and then connected to 1080p HDTV. Mouse tracking was a bit off, but I was able to play everything. It reported that it only needed 15Mbits to stream. I will try on a RPi2 tomorrow. No audio yet.

    1. Hmm, it should be on the main page. Might be a caching issue. But I recently added a widget to the footer of each post with a link to daily deals as an experiment. Previously I had a link in the sidebar, but I suspect more people will see it in the footer than the sidebar.

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