The Raspberry Pi is a great little device, it can be your home theater PC, you can play your music from your phone to it and much more. But in this tutorial we’re going to look at how we can stream Steam games to it.
Before we Begin
I did a tutorial about this method a few months ago, back then the program we were using on the Raspberry Pi was called Limelight but now it has been re-coded and is known as Moonlight.
To do this, your computer will need to have a GTX 650 or above and meet the rest of the requirements from NVIDIA for GameStream. You will also need the latest version of GeForce Experience and the latest drivers for your GPU.
Preparing for Moonlight
Before we begin you will need to make sure that you have all the dependencies installed, these will already be typically installed with Raspbian and I will be using Raspbian for this tutorial. To make sure you have all of the dependencies installed, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install libopus0 libasound2 libudev0 libavahi-client3 libcurl3 libevdev2
Now we will want to make sure that sound is configured, to force sound to come out of the HDMI port we will do the following. First we will edit the /boot/config.txt file with the following command:
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
This will bring up the nano text editor. You then want to go to end of the file and add the following line:
hdmi_drive=2
Next we will want to install Moonlight, this is what will allow us to actually stream from our PC. Moonlight is an open source implementation of GameStream, so you can stream from devices which wouldn’t support GameStream out of the box.
Downloading and Installing Moonlight
Before we are able to install Moonlight, we need to add the Moonlight source to our sources list, to do this we need to edit the sources list to include the Moonlight source:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Once the file has opened you need to add the following line to the file:
deb http://archive.itimmer.nl/raspbian/moonlight wheezy main
Or this line if you are using Raspbian Jessie
deb http://archive.itimmer.nl/raspbian/moonlight jessie main
Once this line has been added we will need to check for updates so that Raspbian will see that it can download Moonlight.
sudo apt-get update
Once this has finished you can finally install Moonlight with the following command:
sudo apt-get install moonlight-embedded
Setting up Moonlight
Now that we’ve got Moonlight downloaded, we need to pair it with GeForce Experience on your computer, first of all you will need to get the IP address of your computer on the network. You can do this by going to command prompt on Windows and entering the following command:
ipconfig
Typically, your computers IP address will begin with 192.168 so that’s what you should be looking for.
We can then pair Moonlight with your computer by entering the following command on your Pi:
moonlight pair your-ip
Replace “your-ip” with the IP of your computer.
Once you enter this command the Raspberry Pi will show a message in the terminal with a PIN that you will need to enter on your computer.
Once that is done, we can begin streaming with Limelight with the following command:
moonlight stream your-ip
Replace “your-ip” with the IP of your computer.
By default Moonlight will stream at 720p at 60fps, but the I use the following command to stream at 30fps because that seems to be less laggy for me:
moonlight stream -30fps your-ip
Other variables can be found here.
Once you enter this command Steam will start up on your computer in Big Picture mode, and you’re done! I was unable to use a controller on my Raspberry Pi Model B+, but I am unsure if that is just my Pi or a general issue, but the keyboard and mouse work fine.
