In this video, we'll be setting up SteamLink on a Raspberry Pi, which is a small computer that runs Linux. This whole setup is going to allow you to stream SteamGames from a PC to the Raspberry Pi over a local network. This means that you can have your computer in one room and then connect the Pi to a TV or projector in another room, like your lounge room or theater room or wherever has a screen that has a HDMI input. And you can stream your gaming to there without the need to move your whole computer. This isn't going to be a guide on all the ins and outs of using SteamLink. It's a really straightforward piece of software to use. We're going to be focusing on how to set it up with the Pi and what you can expect out of it.

Speaking of, what can you expect out of this? Well, I have tried a lot of local streaming solutions before with varying levels of success. But Valve and Raspberry Pi have put in some good work here and it shows I was pleasantly surprised with this thing. Over just Wi-Fi, no ethernet, you can expect 1080p, 60 FPS with a little bit of latency. Maybe some connection issues here and there, but even on my below average, home Wi-Fi, outrouter is not that good. We were able to get something very playable. While I wouldn't be using this for ranked competitive shooters, couch gaming, racing games, anything more casual was definitely playable. And if you can connect both your PC and the Pi to the ethernet, this is all going to work even better and you'll be able to reliably stream 4K. With this setup, you can also connect controllers to the Pi. And once you've connected them, they're extremely easy to use. It just works. It behaves like a regular console. We even had 8 PS5 controllers connected to the Pi without any issues.

So what are you going to need? Well, first of all, you need another computer set up with Steam, your regular gaming setup will work. And you'll also need a 5GHz or better Wi-Fi band connection on your home network. We have a lot of trouble trying to use 2@4GHz. Yours may work, but we recommend 5GHz. And if you can connect your PC or Pi via ethernet, even better. For the setup, you'll also need a Raspberry Pi. We tested this with both a Pi 5 and the older Pi 4, both of which were able to happily stream 1080 60Hz. The Pi 5 does have some better capabilities with it supporting up to 4K 60Hz and 1080 240Hz. But you'll definitely need ethernet to reliably get this. You'll also need a micro SD card to install the OS onto and an SD card reader to plug it into your computer. To power your Pi, you're going to need a USB-C power supply and to keep it cool, you'll need a cooling solution. And of course, you need all the essentials to use the Pi like a keyboard mouse and monitor. Also be aware that the Pi's don't have a standard sized HD mind port. They are micro HDMI and you'll find links to all the things you need in the written guide linked below.

To start, you'll need to install PiOS onto the micro SD card on another computer, download the Raspberry Pi imager, link below, and then open it and select the Pi model you're using, 64-bit PiOS as the operating system, and then select the micro SD card you have plugged into the computer. This will then download the OS image and install it onto the card which may take a short while. Once that's finished, whack your SD card into the Pi, plug in your keyboard mouse and monitor and turn it on. You'll be greeted by this first time setup and just set it up how you would, but just remember your username. For simplicity's sake, keep it as just Pi like so. Also ensure you connect it to the internet and check for any updates.

Now that we're in our desktop environment, we are ready to get cracking. Go ahead and open up a new terminal window, stop by updating our Pi's package list with this command here, and then we'll install SteamLink with this one here. Once that's done, go ahead and launch SteamLink just by typing in the name like so, and that's just gonna go and run through another first time installation. It'll also create a desktop shortcut. If we move this, you should be able to see it there. You might also get this other window that pops up just to hit Enter to continue and run that. And with that, our SteamLink is ready to go.

Now this next step is entirely optional. Right now when you turn on your Pi, you'll need to either come to this terminal and manually type in SteamLink or open it via the desktop icon. But we can make this automatically open up when the Raspberry Pi boots. To do so, open up another terminal window and start by creating a new shell script with this line here. This shell script is essentially going to execute the commands that we place inside of it. So let's go ahead and start by sleeping for four seconds. This is just going to pause this script for four seconds, which gives the Pi enough time to boot up before we go ahead and tell it to open SteamLink like so. Now to exit our script, we'll hit Control X and then we'll hit Y to save it and Enter to confirm. And that has just gone ahead and created all of that and it's called Run underscore SteamLink.

Once that's done, we need to make it an executable file by running this CH Modline here like so. And if you go ahead and open up your file explorer to your Pi homepage like so, you should see our handy work here. And we can also run this to just double check that everything is right so far. So it's going to wait for four seconds and then try and start SteamLink like so. All right, beautiful. By the way, you can quit out of this first initial screen with just escape at any time. Now we're going to edit the auto start file to tell the Pi to run this shell script that we just created when it boots up. So we'll go ahead and open up the auto start file in the nano editor similar to like we did before. And then we're just going to go down and tell it to run the SteamLink shell, which is in home slash Pi like so. Now a quick thing here, this line will change depending on what you set your username. If you set your username to Pi like we did, it's just going to be slash Pi here. But if you set your username as Jeff, you need to set Jeff and whatever you set it to, you need to set it to here accordingly. Back to Pi. And to save it again, control X, Y and enter like so. And now if you reboot your Pi, it should open up SteamLink automatically like so. And if you ever want to stop it from launching on boot, just go back and delete that line that we created.

And with that, we now have a Raspberry Pi running SteamLink, ready to stream games from another PC. Go ahead, turn on your PC and if Steam is open and it's on the same network as your Pi, you will see it appear here and you'll be able to punch in your pairing code and go through the process to set it all up. There is a section in here to connect your controllers to the Pi. We had some issues doing this. So we had to go back and pair it manually with the Pi's Bluetooth setting on the desktop. When you do this, you also might encounter this issue where the window won't go away. And if you want to connect another controller, you have to restart your Pi and do that process again. But once you've paired a controller to the Pi, you should be able to just turn the controller on and it's automatically going to connect to it. Speaking of, not every single controller is compatible with SteamLink, but in the written guide link below, we'll have a list of ones that are officially supported or that we know work definitely. And with that, you should now be able to go off and start streaming your Steam games to your Pi over your home network. We hope you found this guide helpful. And until next time, happy making.