How well does the raspberry pi handle being a moonlight client

MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 46 points –

I'm thinking about moving my PC out to the living room and streaming back to my office when I need to. I've used a number of moonlight clients with mixed results.

Apple TV and Xbox Series X, terrible with massive lag.

Android with Nvidia shield pro or Chromecast with Google TV, not bad but not amazing,

MacOS client on MacBook pro and Google pixel 6 pro over wifi 6, perfect feels like it's on the same machine.

Before I go through all the effort of setting up the Raspberry Pi 4 just wondering if anyone has any first hand experience on the quality of the stream

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I use Moonlight Qt on a raspberry pi 5, and used it on a raspberry pi 4 before that. Both connected via ethernet, streaming at 150 mbps. It works very well, feels like being at the computer. It feels like there is next to no delay, and moonlight reports around 5 ms.

Somewhere else I use a raspberry pi 3 A+ with Moonlight Embedded, connected via Wi-Fi, and it works pretty well, but I can notice the delay a bit more. Still able to stream at 40 mbps.

Good to hear. I'll give it a shot, thanks!

To add more details, I use Sunshine as the server, and stream 1080p, in HEVC for the pi 4 and 5, and h264 for the 3 A+.

I have a 3b+ I want to try this with, it has double the ram and also Ethernet connection vs the 3a+. Do you see yours hit ram limit or you think the delay could be wifi related?

Keen for any tips, thanks!

Probably wifi, I dont think Moonlight Embedded uses much ram. I also get the undervoltage warning nearly constantly, since the a+ is powered by the usb port of a projector. Maybe that also affects things.

What's moonlight? (Genuinely curious, always looking for new tools).

Thanks!

https://moonlight-stream.org/

Just to add some details to that link, it's a network streaming app that lets you remote into another machine and depending on your network configuration it's often fast and responsive enough to play games (I played through Celeste which is a very twitchy precision platformer with no issues). It's also just cool streaming something like Cyberpunk on ultra settings to your phone. There are moonlight clients for nearly any device.

To host moonlight you used to be able to just do it natively through Nvidia gamestream but they turned that feature off. You can use Sunshine now to host https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

Oh, slick!

Now you given me yet another thing to sink time into, haha.

Thanks!

I can't speak on moonlight specifically on the pi 4, but it running steamlink on wasn't bad on it, so I can't imagine it's would be any worse than that for moonlight.

Wired Nvidia shield TV has been my best experience when it comes to both moonlight and steam link out of all of the devices I've tried it with.

Works great. It’s my portable gaming box. I use virtualhere usb over ip on the same Pi too so I can use multiple controllers like a wheel or joystick, pass a full bluetooth adapter directly to it for emulators.

How good is the reach on that?

In the house, anywhere with wifi. Can run decently down to 10-15mbps at 1080p60.

Remotely, over Tailscale, my home uplink is too slow for anything more than 720p60, but its low latency enough I can play games like Mario RPG and get timed hits correct. Or Clone Hero. Games like rocket league tend to be too fast tho, and video breaks up badly.

so Long as you have fast enough uplink, I think I’d be fine anywhere. Sunshine and moonlight are amazing, I used to use Parsec extensively but now it’s just moonlight and sunshine.

I read about moonlight and sunshine, im glad its still current! One more question, your bluetooth controller, is there lots of latency on those?

In most games not noticeable. Only game I have trouble with is emulating Wii, playing Mario Galaxy. The pointer on screen lags, but I think that’s more due to the bluetooth adapter compatibility than any latency added by the usb-> ip -> wifi link.

I’m not an FPS player, so can’t speak to sub second latency….but I do racing sims on this, and it has no trouble with controls and force feedback.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with LibreELEC and Moonlight as a plugin. Streaming from my PC on 1080p with 60 fps and 80 mbit/s works great.