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You could, if you were particularly
masochistic, attempt to install Steam
and find ARM-compatible games on the
platform to play on the Pi. Our brief experiments
show that would not work well. Or you could do
the sensible thing and use it as a Steam Link,
streaming games from your main PC to your living
room TV. This function has been disappointing
on previous models, but it works tremendously
well on the newest Raspberry Pi. A Pi running
the Steam Link app is functionally equivalent to
Valve’s outdated Steam Link hardware, only dialed
up to 10: The Pi is a much more powerful device.
The app has been updated for the fourth-
generation Pi—just run sudo apt install
steamlink to install it—but we’d say it still has a
little way to go. The old techniques for running it
automatically don’t yet work, so you need to keep
a keyboard and mouse connected to your Pi to
launch it when the time is right, and the current
implementation is tied to H.264 streaming. The Pi
4’s hardware makeup caps H.264 at 1080p, which
means the app isn’t able to stream games in 4K,
despite the gigabit Ethernet port clearly being
capable of handling the amount of data required.
Valve may have discontinued the hardware
Steam Link, but it continues to support the
software version. There’s no reason the streaming
stack won’t get an upgrade to support H.265 in
the future, so keep an eye on it if you’re looking to
exploit that new TV to its full extent. Alternatively,
Nvidia’s Shield ($149) coupled with GeForce Now
on your PC can comfortably stream 4K games over
your network, and it’s a significantly more elegant
solution to get the job done.Get the Big
Picture
experience
on the kind
of screen it’s
meant for.nano /etc/samba/smb.conf to
edit its configuration file. Head to
the bottom of the file, and add the
following to define the parameters
of your share:
[storage]
path = /mnt/sdb
writeable=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no
Of course, all of this assumes
you want to use a whole drive for
network storage—you can just as
easily use a folder on an existing
drive. Simply make one in your home
directory with mkdir ~/share , and
switch it out for the drive’s mount
point in the above instructions.
Now we can set up our Samba
user—it’s a better idea to do this
than leaving “public” set to “yes,” for
the security of your files. Run sudo
smbpasswd -a max to create a user
named “max” and you’re prompted
for a password. Restart Samba with
sudo systemctl restart smbd and
you are ready to go—connecting
to your NAS should be as simple asmapping a network drive in Windows
and pointing it at \\nas\storage.
When you later come to
administer your storage box, if
you’ve disconnected the monitor
and peripherals, you’ll need its IP
address—use hostname -I now and
make a note of it.EVERYTHING ELSE
You’ll notice that we’re in a tough spot
with the Pi 4. Its hardware makeup
isn’t difficult, but it’s different—so
different from previous minor-
iteration Pis that rolling old projects
on to the new board hasn’t been
possible. So, let’s look at where
we’re at with some of the more
popular single-use scenarios, and
discuss what you can hope to expect.›› MEDIA BOX Unusually in the
company, LibreElec—which dubs
itself “just enough OS for Kodi”—has
kept pace with the Pi 4, and appears
to be getting regular updates. That
makes setting up a Pi 4 as a Kodi
box absolutely trivial. Head to http://
libreelec.tv, grab the Raspberry Pi 4image from the downloads section,
and write it to a card with Etcher.
There’s a whole seedy streaming
subculture of Kodi that we won’t
go into, but bear in mind the Pi 4’s
hardware decoding capabilities:
If you want to watch 4K media files
on your T V, they need to be in H.264/
H.265 format for the best results, so
convert them beforehand with a tool
such as Handbrake.
A Pi with a decent amount of
storage is perfect for Plex MediaLibrelec’s Kodi implementation includes ex tr a Pi-specific tool s and options.PiHole’s statistics show just how much nefarious online tracking it’s blocked.maximumpc.com JAN 2020 MAXIMUMPC 41