How to stream PC Game for Raspberry Pie with Sunshine and Moonlight

My gaming is PC loudWithin a few minutes of booting a game, it is a pixel-push jet engine-that the kind of thing I want to sit in my living room, when I play games on the big screen. Here is how I solve it by streaming it to a small, less unpleasant raspberry pie from my PC.

Incense and moonlight let you stream PC games on almost any device

Sunshine is a self-hosted game streaming server for Windows and Linux that works with a wide range of hardware (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel), and streams the game with his own PC instead of cloud service.

Once the sunshine is installed, you connect it to the moonlight, a game streaming client that works on almost every device, which you can potentially play games including PC, McOS device, Apple and Android phones and Android phones and Android phones and Tablet, Game Console, Smart TV and of course, humble raspberry pie.

So, my plan: Leave my noise of a PC in my office in the sun, and connect it using a raspberry pie, which is silent and can be taken to whatever screen I want to play around the house. But what will be the power of pie?

Establishing sunlight for game streaming on windows

The process of setting all this is almost very easy for something that is 100% free and open-source. To install sunlight, you just have to do Download installer from developers’ website (You may have to scroll a little down to see the link of the Github download page), and then run the installer. Here is how I install all this on Windows 11.

I will not lead you through clicking through a fully installed procedure; This is all very standard. Just leave the settings as they are and click “Next” until you are asked to choose which components you want to install, click “Install”.

Then you can launch Sunshine from the Start menu. When launching, it moves in the background, leaving an icon in the system tray that you can right-click to open the configuration interface.

When you open the sun, the web UI configuration interface will appear, or you can open it with the icon in the system tray. From here, you can set a password (which I suggest) can change the configuration (really recommended until you need, everything has worked for out-off-the-box for me), and connect the client device.

Once you set a strong password, click on the Pin menu item in the menu bar to reach the pin pairing screen, which you will soon use to add your raspberry pie using the moonlight.

Establish moonlight to join and play games

Installing moonlight on raspberry pie is also a direct process. I am using a 4GB Raspberry Pie 4 Running Raspberry Pie OS 64-bit. Ensure that you are running the latest version of Raspberry Pie OS, as older versions require additional configurations to enable HEVC support, which is an additional problem.

You can install Raspberry Pie OS on an SD card Raspberry Pie Imagera from the official websiteJust select your SD card in your device, 64-bit version of Raspberry Pie OS and image interface, and leave it to it.

Download and install your raspberry pie by following the instructions from Chandni QT Github releases pageMake sure you are downloading the Moonlight QT and not the embedded version which also works on the raspberry pie, which is best for raspberry pie 3 and old devices.

Once the moonlight installed script is completed, it is ready to use.

After you open it, any PCs running sunlight on the same local network will appear in the Moonlight interface. By clicking on one, you will get a pin to enter the sun to pair them.

Go back to Sunshine, enter this pin and give your client device a sensible name.

And we are doing, now you can open a game streaming session from moonlight to Sunshine.

Your entire Windows desktop will be shown, you can launch the game, and everything will run locally. You can also add a game controller and the input will be passed to the host PC as the controller is connected to it. If at any point you need to leave your session, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q is a combination of magic to do so, which I forgot.

Above, you can see my test setup with the Xbox controller added to the PI using Bluetooth. With everything working, the time to take it to TV and see how things perform!

Testing, Twixes and Quality Settings

not bad! However, the default settings (720p on 60fps) led to a slight stuttering, so I reduced it to 30fps. This settings is done on the moonlight by clicking on the gear icon. Your results will vary, however, due to Wi-Fi signal strength, intervention, distance of your router and difference in overall network speed.

The quality of the picture is acceptable for a slight casual use, but if I want to do any high-dear gaming, I will probably use the moonlight to stream my Xbox One, which is on a wired network and seems to handle full-HD streaming without breaking a sweat. I can also stream on my old iPad.

You can also try to go to this setup, and connect your Sunshine Server and Moonlight Client device to VPN like Tailscale, and stream the game from your home to your mobile device (bus doom!). How usable it is, perhaps it will depend on how good the mobile service in your area is.

It is worth a quick note that how to actually works, and why it is so better than regular remote desktop software: it captures the output of your graphics card (GPU) directly, so the real resolution uses it that is the same on your gaming PC; It is just downgrade for streaming. So you can walk on your gaming PC on 4K and 60fps, but a downgraded resolution and framaret on your moonlight client if you need a low bitrate for a slow network.

This also means that while streaming your gaming PC should have a monitor, or there is nothing to render your GPU, and there is nothing for sunlight.

Other ways to stream the game on any device

Beef Gaming PC does not prevent you from playing many high-needs PC games now, as there are many commercial streaming services that host all the hardware for you and just let you bring your mobile device.

Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia Geforce Now, and Amazon Luna all let you stream the game on your mobile devices from Cloud, making you live with the latest gaming release to invest a big hardware.