Start Steam on PC when pinged by Steamlink on AppleTV.

Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 25 points – 10 months ago

Hi folks, I'm tinkering a lot with bash scripts and I wonder if it is possible to make steam launch when the steamlink on my appleTV pings the computer to find out if it is working.

The issue is that I sometimes sit down at my TV and want to play, finding out my Steam Machine is offline due to steam not running, it being suspended or shut down.

Since the appleTV shouldnt be pinging the PC if steamlink is off it shouldnt be an issue, right?

Bonus points: Obviously I would then like to expand this to wake on lan but I'd also need games to run without login then. Does anyone have ideas to this?

Thanks for reading and have a good one.

So valve had an open source SDK for the original steam link hardware box here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steamlink-sdk

I've not poked around it, but I'd try going through the source to see if you can figure out how the discovery protocol works. I'd guess it's a bonjour-like mDNS or UPnP based system, so you'd be looking to write a piece of listener software for whatever its discovery protocol is and then have it do what you like when it detects the discovery requests.

If you want to do it with wake on LAN too, run the application on a raspberry pi or something to then WOL your main PC.

Thats one of the most awesome, concise yet elaborate answers I got since a long time. Thank you very much! :)

It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.

I would try this route first.

Here is my logic: it's the effort to find what you are looking for in a bunch of files and I don't know how many lines of source code versus the effort to search for some packets (which you should listen for anyway in the final solution) sent from a specific IP address over a relatively small amount of time.