Earlier this year we released Raspberry Pi Connect, which lets you access your Raspberry Pi from anywhere, either through a remote shell interface or by screen sharing. But perhaps, occasionally, you might need to screen share some other computer; what if you want to screen share your big PC, with its gaming graphics capabilities, around your house? Is it possible to use it to play your games from anywhere? Happily, thanks to Valve’s hugely popular Steam Link product, the answer is yes. With Steam Link, our kids can — OK, we can — play PC games on any computer in the house, without having to lug the PC around. And now, you can run Steam Link on your Raspberry Pi 5!

Steam Link is actually tackling some quite difficult challenges to enable us to play graphics-heavy games remotely. Firstly, screen sharing is not normally optimised for sending high quality images, since you have to work quite hard to keep both the bitrate and the latency down; you also don’t normally transmit audio as well as video, and you need to do a bit of magic to talk to game controllers. So the smart folks at Valve have successfully solved quite a few hard problems to bring this into being.

Even better, Sam Lantinga from Valve — who is also the developer of SDL, a simple multimedia programming library — has been working for a little while on getting Steam Link to run on Raspberry Pi 5. The previous method used to run Steam Link on Raspberry Pi OS no longer worked very well after we moved away from the closed-source Broadcom multimedia libraries, and with Wayland, a different approach was needed. Sam has been working with the Raspberry Pi software team to use our hardware in the most efficient way possible.

Valve’s announcement of Steam Link v1.3.13 shows that Sam has been able to get Steam Link working at some amazing rates on Raspberry Pi 5, including 4kp60 and even 1080p240 (obviously you’ll need a suitable monitor for that!).

To install Steam Link yourself, grab yourself an up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS image and type:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install steamlink

steamlink

Enjoy!

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