14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has just launched the complete Steam Link SDK, making way for developers and the community to build native apps for this piece of hardware.
The idea behind the Steam Link is a really good one. Users can connect their gaming machines to the TV, via the network. This means that you don’t need a new and shiny Steam Machine if you already have a powerful computer at home. Valve wants to dominate the living room, but it doesn't care how it’s going to achieve that.
Steam Link can also stream content from a Windows PC to a Linux PC, but that doesn't seem to be the focus anymore for this particular technology. Unfortunately for Valve, Steam Link was announced along with the Steam Machines and the Steam Controller, and it seems to have had the least of success.
Steam Link hardware revealed
Information about the hardware in Steam Link has been floating around for some time, but now that the SDK had been released on GitHub, Valve has also disclosed the hardware and the software that’s being run on the device.
“The Steam Link hardware is a single core ARMv7 processor using the hard-float ABI, running at 1 GHz, with neon instruction support. It has approximately 256 MB of available RAM and 500 MB of usable flash storage,” Valve revealed on GitHub.
The device is also running a custom Linux firmware based on kernel 3.8 and glibc 2.19, with support for OpenGL ES 2.0, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2.0.
This opens up a host of very interesting possibilities, like the creation of native apps for it or even the installation of major application like Kodi, for example (former XBMC). The fact that the SKD is now open will offer the community the chance to breathe new life into the hardware, beyond what Valve has originally intended for it.
It’s worth noting that the firmware for Steam Link is not freeware, and it hasn’t been made available, the SDK being the exception.