Streaming is all the rage now right? How about streaming your PlayStation 4 to your Linux box using Chiaki, a new open source Remote Play client. Note: To be clear, this is entirely a community effort and nothing to do with Sony.
This was actually announced last month, so I've no idea how we entirely missed it until today. Earlier this month it had another release, adding in some helpful features and bug fixes and it seems to be coming along very nicely.
Personally, my PS4 is constantly gathering dust. I much prefer everything about using my PC and my wonderful office compared to the cold and lonely living room. So to hear about Chiaki, well that's possibly the highlight of my month.
Pictured above, is my own desktop running on Manjaro Linux KDE and as you can see I have a window open with my PS4 being streamed to it. Something I thought would never, ever happen but it has.
Setup was ridiculously simple too!
Download the AppImage and open it, load up your PS4 and go into Settings -> Remote Play Connection Settings -> Add Device and then you will be able to get the PIN that Chiaki needs. Once entered, you're approved and you can go ahead and play. That's it.
A picture can only do so much though right? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? You tell me, have a look below of it actually in action in a really quick test video I did:
Direct Link
Yup, that's the PS4 exclusive Marvel's Spider-Man running on my Linux desktop being played with a simple Logitech F310 gamepad. Absolute madness.
However, there's a few things the developer noted that is not currently implemented:
- Congestion Control
- H264 Error Concealment (FEC and active error recovery however are implemented)
- Touchpad support (Triggering the Touchpad Button is currently possible by pressing "T" on the keyboard)
- Rumble
- Configurable Keybindings
Incredible stuff from Florian Märkl and anyone else contributing to it.
You can find Chiaki on GitHub.
Hat tip to Harri for the link.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I've previously used Sony's official PS4 Remote Play app in a Windows guest on VMware on Linux and it worked satisfactory but a native app is a big win too. Looking forward to playing some more Uncharted 4, Lost Legacy and upcoming Last Of Us 2 on my PC.
Quoting: wojtek88Oh sweet. Liam please do not write about it too often, as Sony will kill the project (I hope they won't)!
I don't see why they would. You still need a PS4 for this to work, and it just hooks into the streaming service that they provide. Sony don't make any money through their own streaming apps (AFAIK), so there's no lost revenue to recover.
The only possibly grey area to my mind, is how this was developed. If it was ground-up trial and error, then I'm pretty sure it's untouchable from a legal perspective (though Sony could be arseholes and change the protocol involved), but if the dev somehow got ahold of an existing client and reverse-engineered it to create their own client, then it could be open to legal attacks (depending on local laws and license agreements).
Quoting: WorMzyI don't see why they would. You still need a PS4 for this to work, and it just hooks into the streaming service that they provide. Sony don't make any money through their own streaming apps (AFAIK), so there's no lost revenue to recover.There was a time, that Remote Play was working on Android only on phones manufactored by Sony, there was an unofficial version of Remote Play that I used to use on my old Nexus 5, but Sony was bumping up software version to make this app not working on other phones.
AFAIK on Android it's still the case - you need phone manufactored by Sony. So they control which devices can run Remote Play and they do not support Linux. I want Remote Play on Linux, so I hope Sony won't do anything against this tool.
Quoting: WorMzyThe only possibly grey area to my mind, is how this was developed. If it was ground-up trial and error, then I'm pretty sure it's untouchable from a legal perspective (though Sony could be arseholes and change the protocol involved), but if the dev somehow got ahold of an existing client and reverse-engineered it to create their own client, then it could be open to legal attacks (depending on local laws and license agreements).Florian does call it reverse engineering on Twitter (though he mentions the protocol specifically rather than the client, if that makes a difference).
And one could say that Sony weren’t losing revenue either when they patched the PS3 to make it impossible to install Linux on it. (On the contrary, I might have bought one if not for that, but that’s another story.) Some companies are quite strict about not letting people use their products in ways that they don’t control.
Last edited by Salvatos on 29 September 2019 at 8:02 pm UTC
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