Steamdeck - Streaming Server

Most use-cases for game streaming invovling a steamdeck considers using the steamdeck as the client. Here I explore using the steamdeck as a streaming server and a macbook air as a streaming client.

Part of the use-case here was not needing to rely on existing realiable network infrastucture, either wired or wireless. Ideally I wanted to have a private network between the 2 devices over USB-C. While this network is primarily for streaming over, it's also an added benifit to be able to share an internet connection from my laptop to the steamdeck via the connection.

Usually both the steamdeck and the laptop will act as a host. We want the steamdeck to be able to act as a device, so it can present as a network interface. To do this, we need to enable USB Dual Role (DRD) in the BIOS.

Shutdown your steamdeck, then hold volume-up + power to boot into BIOS/recovery mode. Select Setup Utility → Advanced → USB Configuration → USB Dual Role Device and select DRD.

A user named dafta, created a useful script for sharing the decks internet connection to another device over USB. This is 99% of what we needed, creating the usb network device. The only difference is that we want to consume the internet connection of the laptop, not share the decks internet connection with the laptop. Therefore a few changing to use a DHCP client instead of a DHCP server and removing the NAT rules, we end up with the following script:

usb-ether.sh