Having some problems with this one. Getting intermittent failure to transmit sound and video. Just goes in and out. Restarting sometimes will help but the Raspberry's reliability has gotten so bad that I'm back to the hardware link again. The hardware link continues to be rock-solid with better mouse cursor behavior but slower network speed (but no so slow as to impact gameplay in any way).

Hmmm, going on travel this week but, when I get back I'll throw a raspbian install on it and see if it behaves any differently.

Ok, business trip got cancelled at last minute so I tried out steamlink on raspbian instead of OSMC. Only a brief look so far but definitely better on raspbian. Performance appears to be at least as good as the hardware steamlink with faster network speed.

...so, yea, it appears to be OSMC that's the issue. If I want both, I think dual-boot is the way to go. (also enabled SSH and added "@reboot nohup steamlink &" to my crontab so it will auto launch steamlink at startup.)

One question though, any way to not have it apply any filters by default at startup?

Originally posted by Corvus Shade:

One question though, any way to not have it apply any filters by default at startup?

Yep, you can change it to stream Big Picture instead of recent games in the advanced streaming settings.

Originally posted by Corvus Shade:

...so, yea, it appears to be OSMC that's the issue. If I want both, I think dual-boot is the way to go. (also enabled SSH and added "@reboot nohup steamlink &" to my crontab so it will auto launch steamlink at startup.)

swetoast created an OSMC plugin that shuts down the interface and improves performance:
https://github.com/swetoast/steamlink-launcher

Originally posted by slouken:

...
swetoast created an OSMC plugin that shuts down the interface and improves performance:
https://github.com/swetoast/steamlink-launcher

Yea, that's what I was using. One thing still in OSMC's favor though; it natively recognizes the steam controller through the dongle so the steam controller works in Kodi as well. I seem to recall a python driver on github though. Might even be native kernel support (4.19 and later, but I don't know if that includes ARM processors).

Ok, now I've had some "playtime" with steamlink on raspbian. It's performance is at least on par with the hardware link if not better. One "nice to have" though would be the ability to use the Steam Controller through the dongle in the raspbian desktop. That should be possible by installing package "steam-drivers" from the repositories. However, when I try, I get an error message suggesting that it can't update the udev rules because steamlink has them....
.
Unpacking steam-devices (1.0.0.59-4) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/steam-devices_1.0.0.59-4_all.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-steam-input.rules', which is also in package steamlink 1.0.7
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/steam-devices_1.0.0.59-4_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
.
One possible fix might be to uninstall steamlink, install steam-drivers, then re-install steamlink and see if steamlink can go in after steam-drivers but, before I do that, I thought it might be a good idea to ask first.

Originally posted by Corvus Shade:

Ok, now I've had some "playtime" with steamlink on raspbian. It's performance is at least on par with the hardware link if not better. One "nice to have" though would be the ability to use the Steam Controller through the dongle in the raspbian desktop. That should be possible by installing package "steam-drivers" from the repositories. However, when I try, I get an error message suggesting that it can't update the udev rules because steamlink has them....
.
Unpacking steam-devices (1.0.0.59-4) ...
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/steam-devices_1.0.0.59-4_all.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-steam-input.rules', which is also in package steamlink 1.0.7
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/steam-devices_1.0.0.59-4_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
.
One possible fix might be to uninstall steamlink, install steam-drivers, then re-install steamlink and see if steamlink can go in after steam-drivers but, before I do that, I thought it might be a good idea to ask first.

Try upgrading to the latest steamlink package:
http://media.steampowered.com/steamlink/rpi/steamlink_1.0.8_armhf.deb

There isn't a way to pair the controller to the dongle in the Steam Link app, but if you start streaming and go to the Big Picture Controller Settings, you can click "Add a Steam Controller" there and walk through the pairing process remotely.