The Raspberry Pi is a box of tricks that can do almost anything you’d want from a small computer in the home. It can run a smart home server, host cloud storage, and even replace your Roku as a full-blown media center. But limitations do exist, and I’ve recently run into one.
I can’t stream PS5 games to my Pi
My PS5 doesn’t get enough use. I’m mostly an Xbox gamer on account of being quite happy with Game Pass, and the fact that we have two Series X consoles in the home. This means I can buy a game like Battlefield VI once and play it on both consoles simultaneously, perfect for the kind of co-op gaming sessions my partner and I crave after a long week.
But I only have one PS5, and that means it’s basically a single-player machine. My backlog is as long as my arm, with games like Ghost of Yotei and even God of War Ragnarok still needing to be checked off my list. I’m at the stage in my life where video games have to take a back seat to work and fixing things around the house that I said I’d do months ago.
Remote Play means you don’t need to be sitting in front of your console to play. You could do so from a monitor on your desk, during a 15-minute lunch break. Or you could turn the bedroom TV into a second screen and play in bed. My Raspberry Pi could help me find a bit more time for playing games, or so I thought.
Unfortunately, after spending too much time trying to figure it out, I’ve had to give up on the dream for now.
I’m all out of ideas
Officially, Sony only supports streaming via its official apps. These are available for smartphones, Windows, and Mac. Unofficially, there’s an app called Chiaki and its successor Chiaki-ng that brings this functionality to other platforms, including Linux (and, in theory, the Raspberry Pi).
There’s a build of Chiaki that works with the Raspberry Pi’s ARM architecture in the Raspberry Pi OS (Debian) repositories. Though this version launches and I was able to pair my PS5, the app cannot establish a PS5 stream when I try to play.
Not to worry, I thought, I’ll try and use a different version of Chiaki. Chiaki-ng is a next-generation version of the app with a Flatpak image hosted on Flathub that’s relatively easy to install. First, I installed Flatpak, then I added the necessary repository, and then I installed the app.
I paired my PS5 and even managed to start a stream, but that’s where the issues began. In 1080p streaming quality, the frame rate is a mess. By reducing the quality to 720p, a noticeable drop, things are better, but still no match for other streaming devices.
Fiddling with hardware decoding seems to reveal the issue. The only way the Raspberry Pi is able to stream successfully is with hardware decoding disabled. This means video decoding has to take place in software, which explains the terrible performance. Even though the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware I’m using officially supports Vulkan and OpenGL, I still had no luck.
There was one other weird issue I encountered, too. Because my PS5 outputs in HDR to my TV, all of the colors appear to be inverted when I’m streaming. I’d be willing to overlook this and switch off HDR on the TV, were it not for the terrible frame rate.
Emulators and other streaming services still work great
The Raspberry Pi is a retro gaming beast, of course, so my experience hasn’t tarnished its reputation as a gaming machine. I’ve been playing with emulation-focused Linux distro Recalbox recently, and I’ve currently got a microSD card hanging out of the memory card slot that boots straight into DOS with the aid of DOSBian.
I know that the Raspberry Pi’s GPU is powerful enough to handle 3D rendering, I’ve been playing Diddy Kong Racing (N64) and Sega Rally 2 (Dreamcast) on it recently. Chiaki-ng likely needs some optimization for use on the Raspberry Pi, and I’ll be the first to admit that I do not possess the skills to make this happen.
This is further proven by my experiments with Game Pass. I’ve tried streaming several Xbox titles straight from the cloud in my browser, and the performance is more than satisfactory. It’s somewhat ironic that games are more playable on my Raspberry Pi when streamed remotely from the internet into a browser than they are from a machine on the local network to a dedicated app.
While I’m sad my Raspberry Pi can’t stream PS5 games locally, there are plenty of other things it can do, like save me money on self-hosted services or protect me from invasive smart TV tracking and advertisements.
