Introduction: Installing Moonlight Game Streaming on Pi 3

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This tutorial will go through all of the necessary steps to install Moonlight onto your Raspberry Pi with Jessie. Moonlight is used to stream games from a powerful PC to a Raspberry Pi for greater portability and ease of use. I use it to play games on a TV (or on the go) while my actual PC is a tower PC in my office.This tutorial assumes you have STEAM installed.

Raspbian Jessie does work now, but the install process is slightly different. for the Raspbian Wheezy install method, check out my friend's instructable at:

https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Install-Moonlight-on-a-Raspberry-Pi/?comments=all#C4XW7X1IRGZU5S5

Step 1: Step 1: Ensure PC Compatibility

In order for Nvidia GameStream (which is what Moonlight uses to send game controls and video back and forth between the Pi and your computer) to work, your computer must either have a desktop GTX 600 series GPU or higher, or notebook 660M, 670M, 675M, 680M, or 700Mb series or higher notebook GPU, along with 4GB of RAM and a few other things. To make sure that your PC is compatible with Nvidia Gamestream, you first need to download Geforce Experience from

http://www.geforce.com/geforce-experience. Once installed, click on the My Rig Tab at the top and check that in the Overview section it says Ready with a green check mark by GameStream. If it does not meet the basic requirements for GameStream then it simply WILL NOT WORK.

Step 2: Adding the Moonlight Github Repository to the Raspberry Pi's Repo List

The Raspberry Pi's version of Moonlight is an unofficial port of Moonlight for the Pi, so since it's unofficial and isn't registered as a standard application by Raspbian, you can't install it without manually adding the Github Repo for Moonlight to Raspbian's Repo List. To do this, open up a terminal window on your Pi and type in:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

This will open the in-terminal text editor, and will automatically open the repo list for editing. Then, using the down arrow to go to the very bottom of the list, copy and paste in this line of code (the picture above shows a slightly different code for Wheezy, so don't get confused.)


deb http://archive.itimmer.nl/raspbian/moonlight jessie main

then hit control X to exit and hit y to save.

Step 3: Installing Moonlight on the Raspberry Pi With Jessie

Now that the repository for Moonlight has been added to the Raspbian Repo List, we can finally install Moonlight for the Raspberry Pi!

To start, in that same Terminal window you entered previously, type in these two codes. They may take a few minutes to finish.

apt-get update
apt-get install moonlight-embedded

(For those of you new to Raspbian code, apt-get update uses all the links in the Repo List to see if any new content is available for the Raspberry Pi, and will update if necessary. It will take a few minutes. apt-get install Moonlight is what will finally install Moonlight Pi on your Pi system so you can play games!)

you may want to restart your system after both commands complete. do that with "sudo reboot".

Step 4: Pairing Your RasPi With Your PC

Great! Now you've got Moonlight-Embedded installed on your Raspi, but if you try to run it now, you'll find it won't work. That's because we first have to pair the Raspi with your PC. In order to do that, we need to know the IP address of your PC. (This Instructable focuses on In-House Streaming. I can't effectively make an Instructable on Mobile Streaming currently, due to restrictions to my firewall).

To find out your PC's IP address, click the home button (on Windows) and type in run, then hit enter. This will bring up a small program that you can use to find and run other programs on your PC. type in cmd and hit enter.

A black window should appear with white text. click inside the window to select it, type in ipconfig, and hit enter.

The window that appears should look something like the second picture above. All we care about is the IPv4 address. Remember that or write it on a post-it.

Step 5: Pairing Your RasPi With Your PC - Part 2

On the PI, open up terminal and copy the code below:


moonlight pair X.X.X.X

Replace the X.X.X.X with the IP address you wrote down. An example of this would be "moonlight pair 192.168.1.101"

After typing the code, the PI will generate a four digit code. On your PC, a box will pop up that says SHIELD IS REQUESTING TO CONNECT (like in the picture above). Enter the four digit code that the Pi generated and your Pi will be successfully paired with the PC and ready to game!

Step 6: Stream a Game From PC to Your Pi!

After successfully pairing, its time to stream your game!

Enter the code below into your Pi's terminal window:

moonlight stream

After this, it will open STEAM on the PC and begin streaming to your Pi! Enjoy! :)