I really get fatigued sitting in my chair playing steam games, I almost pulled the trigger on one of these the other day with the intent of installing moonlight, and sunshine to stream to my TV. Anyone have any opinions? I saw there’s 2 versions, does it make sense to get the pro version? Can I use my PS5 controller on it?
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A used minipc could also achieve this, potentially with less cost then buying the Shield.
If you’re planning to use paid streaming apps with it too, that’s a different story and probably worth it.
Or you could even go the long HDMI cable + USB route.
The SteamLink experience within the Shield has only gotten worse over the years, and a LOT worse recently. Examples include:
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The app often fails to launch big picture mode, or launches it, but without focus, requiring me to go walk to my desk in the other room to fix it.
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Connecting to a PC with a game already-in-progress no longer puts the game in focus immediately, again requiring me to walk over to the desk and fix it.
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The app is prone to having the video completely freeze within any of the Steam UI, requiring a disconnect and reconnect. Like VERY prone. Like, it’ll take 5 tries at connecting and reconnecting to actually make it into a game.
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Some games that used to be able to play well remotely now have an unplayable amount of input lag.
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The app will occasionally get drop to si gle-digit framerates within a game, for which the only fix seems to be to completely reboot the Shield.
As a media player, I’m still overall happy with the Shield, and I know there’s a rather large community of custom OS enthusiasts for it, but with the degradation of Steam’s performance, and the slow addition of ad gabrage in the home UI over the years, the Shield is NOT sensible for a new purchase.
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I have a pro that I use with a ps5 controller, sunshine and moonlight, but I connect the controller directly to my pc instead of going through the shield. Using the shield results in a different “feel” to the games and android insists on stealing the ps button input for android menu nonsense without any way (that I could find) to disable that and pass it through to the pc.
There’s lots of options for extending Bluetooth and usb to computers further away if yours isn’t close enough. I wouldn’t recommend this setup if you needed to connect the controller through the shield. I am sensitive to that sort of thing, but I think most people would find it pretty bad, especially if they have any experience using it with a console.
The rest works brilliantly (when connected with wired networking), I rarely use my pc directly for games anymore.
