How I Use SteamLink #
This is probably nothing new, but it was a recent discovery of mine I wanted to share in case anyone else is dealing with the same problem.
I’ve tried to get SteamLink to work for me multiple times. In different houses, on different networks, and I always ran into the same issues: lag, drops, over-compression, and disconnects, shouting matches of whose to blame for losing the roung.
And that’s a real shame, because my wife and I love playing co-op games on the couch together in the living room.
We tried running a long HDMI cable from her desktop to the TV, which worked okay, but controller input was a nightmare. Long USB cables caused issues after a certain length. Dongles were hit or miss at the range we needed, and getting multiple controllers to work reliably was always a gamble.
So we mostly gave up and defaulted to playing games on the Switch, since setting everything else up was too much of a hassle.
But I found a better way #
Recently I dusted off an old iPad a family member gave me when they upgraded. Nothing fancy, just a base model from around 2019, 32GB of storage, lightly cracked screen. I’d been using it just to look up walkthroughs for my wife.
We had just tried SteamLink on the Apple TV again to play PlateUp, but the lag was still bad enough to mess us up when things got hectic. The one thing I liked, though, was how well the Apple TV handled our controllers. That gave me an idea.
I installed SteamLink on the iPad, turned off video and audio streaming, and used it just to connect our controllers and send inputs to the desktop. The video and audio still went through the HDMI cable we had already set up.
This was exactly what I’d been looking for. The picture never drops out, and since SteamLink is only sending inputs, the lag is barely noticeable on our network. Sure, this setup isn’t ideal for ultra-precise games like competitive fighters or twitch shooters, but for stuff like PlateUp or Overcooked, it’s perfect.
But wait, there’s more #
One thing I always hated with the old setup was dealing with keyboard and mouse input. We don’t play many games that use it, but sometimes you need to click something or type a name in.
I was getting ready to set up KDE Connect, but decided to poke around in the SteamLink settings first.
And wouldn’t you know it, you can enable touch controls, and with just a few checkboxes, get a pop-up keyboard and touchpad-style mouse.
This might be super obvious to some people, but it completely changed how we play. Like most folks, we’ve got a big backlog on Steam, but we want to play most of it together — and sitting at a desk just isn’t fun.
Now we’re playing way more than we used to, though honestly, it’s mostly PlateUp lately since that’s my wife’s favorite.
The HDMI Setup #
Our computer room is close to the living room, so we were able to use a good 30ft HDMI cable. If your PC is farther away, you’ll probably need other options. This is the one I used. (Not sponsored or affiliate.) I bought it a while ago and it still works great.
If you need more distance, HDBaseT HDMI-over-Ethernet boxes like this one (Also not sponsored or affiliate.)are a popular option. They can get you at least 100 feet, and sometimes more.
Some folks say they’ve had success with HDMI over IP, but just know that latency is usually higher with those.
What’s next? #
I’m really happy with this setup, but there are still a few things I want to improve.
First, I need a better solution for mouse and keyboard input, especially for older point-and-click games that don’t support controllers. We play a lot of those. Black Mirror goes hard. The iPad is the weak point here, so I’m thinking about grabbing a used Android tablet to see if SteamLink handles mouse input better on that.
Next up is setting up Wake-on-LAN for my wife’s desktop. Would be nice not to have to run into the other room just to turn the thing on every time.
And finally, I want to revisit SteamLink on my Linux machine. Games run fine normally, but as soon as I start a SteamLink session, things get choppy and weird, like the whole system’s under stress. I’m guessing it’s how the streaming process is handled on Linux, so I’m going to dig into that more and see what I can tweak.
If you’re into this kind of setup stuff, feel free to follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky, or just check back here. I’ll post updates as I figure things out.