merlin3001
Well Known Member
Thought I should post my experiences here, as this was a bit of process and the info on the web can be slightly conflicting. Hopefully, this can help anyone else who might go down this route.
tl:dr version: If you are thinking about doing this, make sure your PC and 2016+ Samsung Smart TV are close enough / same room (YMMV). Also make sure they are connected to your network with wires. Go with Xbox One controllers. A specific wireless dongle is needed and can be hard to find locally. A good place to buy is Amazon US, where you can buy a controller plus wireless adapter for less than the price of a separate controller locally. Upside of Xbox One controller: most steam games use the xbox button layout/symbols.
The (really) long version:
I've always been primarily a PC gamer, but I do enjoy sitting back with some mates and mashing buttons with some Tekken or similar running on the TV. But with the current price of consoles, it seems a bit of a luxury to have both. But then I discovered that, with Samsung smart TVs from 2016 onwards, you can download the Steam Link App for free onto your TV. It then basically mirrors what is happening on Steam onto the TV (in 1080p for 2016 models and in 4k for 2017+ models). So, that sounds pretty good I think. Sure, you are limited to only playing games in your Steam library.And just doing a quick test and it all seemed very slick and easy (it all runs through steams big picture mode). But that's where things suddenly get complex. Because you also need game controllers etc. So, here is basically a short summary of some NB details and what I tried and found:
Firstly - relevant is my main PC sits in the same lounge as the TV. It is about 3 metres away from the couch - but faces the opposite direction. The actual box sits on the floor. They are both connected to the home network with wired connections. I do stream from Steam to a PC in another part of the house which uses old N wireless and the image quality does suffer.
Now my challenge - getting two controllers to work flawlessy while playing Tekken and sitting on the couch. Easy right? Not so much. There seem to be basically three controllers that Steam plays nicely with: Logitech, PS and Xbox controllers. And since none of them are exactly cheap, buying two of a particular controller as a test was not really an option.
Part 1 of the challenge: where will the controllers connect to... Some of the high-end Samsung TVs have bluetooth built in. Mine is a 60ku7000 and doesnt have this. It seems that with the built-in bluetooth, you can connect your controller to the TV and the app works. But that's not an option for me, so I need to connect the controllers to my PC. Also note that South Africa tends to upscale the model numbers -> i.e TVs that are sold as 6 series elsewhere are sold as 7 series in South Africa. Their 7 series is our 8 etc. So when checking specs, be sure to check the SA Samsung site and not the international sites as the features differ.
Part 2 - what controllers to buy.
I have Logitech G502 mouse and G413 keyboard, but their controllers had quite a few comments that people struggled to get two to play nicely together, so I struck it off the list.
So now between PS4 and Xbox One. My prior console history has been mainly on the blue side, so the PS4 was my first choice. Plus I had a mate with two controllers that I could borrow as a test. But to get them connect requires a bluetooth adapter (since my PC did not have it built in). It seems that some people have good luck with a BT adaptor getting two PS4 controllers working and others dont - and a lot depends on the quality of the BT adapter and it needs to be at least BT version 4.0 (some recommended vers 4.1 or better). But the quality and range of these dongles are hardly great in SA. 4.0 seems the best you can get from the usual suspects and the likes of the Asus options are end-of-life and no longer available. I ended up on the Avantree dongle as the 'best of a bad lot'
Now to test. I got both controllers working perfectly about 90% of the time. But every now and again, one controller would just lag (badly, button presses taking 2-3 seconds to register) for no reason and would require reconnection to get running. Which clearly is not great (unless you are playing against the guy with the lagging controller). I suspected it was down to distance and direction of facing to the dongle. If we tried the controllers facing the PC from the same distance, it was perfect. But remember, we are talking all of 3 meters range, so hardly a demanding ask from a bluetooth connection. I also found that having the dongle on the USB 2.0 bus on my monitor was essential - if the dongle was at the back on my PC, it just didn't play nice at all with the PS4 controllers.
So that leaves us with just Xbox One controllers. For these, you need the dedicated Xbox One wireless dongle. I was pretty confident that this would work based on internet comments. But trying to source a decent price dongle seemed a challenge. You do get combined boxes with a controller and dongle, but certainly couldn't find any in the local stores. And the online option I found (raru) seems to be for the older version of the dongle (that is both much larger and apparently quite fragile). Ended up ordering it off Amazon US, where the combined option was all of $3 more than just a controller on it's own (so I bought two obviously). Landed price of controllers was less than buying two controllers (with no dongles) in the stores.
A benefit of the Xbox controller to mention here is that most of the steam games are programmed with this in mind. So instructions, quicktime events (Mortal Combat X, I'm looking at you) etc all show Xbox buttons.
Finally, got it all installed - and then the wireless dongle was not recognised by Windows 10. This is apparently not a particularly unusual problem. If you get this, you have to basically just keep downloading and trying the various possible driver files and manually install them right up until one of them finally gets recognised (since only one of the files will match for a specific windows built version).
But now, I effectively have a console experience on my TV with two controllers for a total cost of ~R2000. Plus my games are pretty cheap (Mortal Combat X was R100 at the last steam sale, Overcooked cost me R75 at the same time etc).
Oh, and if you got this far, thanks for reading to the end
I can at least promise that the time it took you to read this far is a lot less time than it took me to research and get the whole thing up and running.....
tl:dr version: If you are thinking about doing this, make sure your PC and 2016+ Samsung Smart TV are close enough / same room (YMMV). Also make sure they are connected to your network with wires. Go with Xbox One controllers. A specific wireless dongle is needed and can be hard to find locally. A good place to buy is Amazon US, where you can buy a controller plus wireless adapter for less than the price of a separate controller locally. Upside of Xbox One controller: most steam games use the xbox button layout/symbols.
The (really) long version:
I've always been primarily a PC gamer, but I do enjoy sitting back with some mates and mashing buttons with some Tekken or similar running on the TV. But with the current price of consoles, it seems a bit of a luxury to have both. But then I discovered that, with Samsung smart TVs from 2016 onwards, you can download the Steam Link App for free onto your TV. It then basically mirrors what is happening on Steam onto the TV (in 1080p for 2016 models and in 4k for 2017+ models). So, that sounds pretty good I think. Sure, you are limited to only playing games in your Steam library.And just doing a quick test and it all seemed very slick and easy (it all runs through steams big picture mode). But that's where things suddenly get complex. Because you also need game controllers etc. So, here is basically a short summary of some NB details and what I tried and found:
Firstly - relevant is my main PC sits in the same lounge as the TV. It is about 3 metres away from the couch - but faces the opposite direction. The actual box sits on the floor. They are both connected to the home network with wired connections. I do stream from Steam to a PC in another part of the house which uses old N wireless and the image quality does suffer.
Now my challenge - getting two controllers to work flawlessy while playing Tekken and sitting on the couch. Easy right? Not so much. There seem to be basically three controllers that Steam plays nicely with: Logitech, PS and Xbox controllers. And since none of them are exactly cheap, buying two of a particular controller as a test was not really an option.
Part 1 of the challenge: where will the controllers connect to... Some of the high-end Samsung TVs have bluetooth built in. Mine is a 60ku7000 and doesnt have this. It seems that with the built-in bluetooth, you can connect your controller to the TV and the app works. But that's not an option for me, so I need to connect the controllers to my PC. Also note that South Africa tends to upscale the model numbers -> i.e TVs that are sold as 6 series elsewhere are sold as 7 series in South Africa. Their 7 series is our 8 etc. So when checking specs, be sure to check the SA Samsung site and not the international sites as the features differ.
Part 2 - what controllers to buy.
I have Logitech G502 mouse and G413 keyboard, but their controllers had quite a few comments that people struggled to get two to play nicely together, so I struck it off the list.
So now between PS4 and Xbox One. My prior console history has been mainly on the blue side, so the PS4 was my first choice. Plus I had a mate with two controllers that I could borrow as a test. But to get them connect requires a bluetooth adapter (since my PC did not have it built in). It seems that some people have good luck with a BT adaptor getting two PS4 controllers working and others dont - and a lot depends on the quality of the BT adapter and it needs to be at least BT version 4.0 (some recommended vers 4.1 or better). But the quality and range of these dongles are hardly great in SA. 4.0 seems the best you can get from the usual suspects and the likes of the Asus options are end-of-life and no longer available. I ended up on the Avantree dongle as the 'best of a bad lot'
Now to test. I got both controllers working perfectly about 90% of the time. But every now and again, one controller would just lag (badly, button presses taking 2-3 seconds to register) for no reason and would require reconnection to get running. Which clearly is not great (unless you are playing against the guy with the lagging controller). I suspected it was down to distance and direction of facing to the dongle. If we tried the controllers facing the PC from the same distance, it was perfect. But remember, we are talking all of 3 meters range, so hardly a demanding ask from a bluetooth connection. I also found that having the dongle on the USB 2.0 bus on my monitor was essential - if the dongle was at the back on my PC, it just didn't play nice at all with the PS4 controllers.
So that leaves us with just Xbox One controllers. For these, you need the dedicated Xbox One wireless dongle. I was pretty confident that this would work based on internet comments. But trying to source a decent price dongle seemed a challenge. You do get combined boxes with a controller and dongle, but certainly couldn't find any in the local stores. And the online option I found (raru) seems to be for the older version of the dongle (that is both much larger and apparently quite fragile). Ended up ordering it off Amazon US, where the combined option was all of $3 more than just a controller on it's own (so I bought two obviously). Landed price of controllers was less than buying two controllers (with no dongles) in the stores.
A benefit of the Xbox controller to mention here is that most of the steam games are programmed with this in mind. So instructions, quicktime events (Mortal Combat X, I'm looking at you) etc all show Xbox buttons.
Finally, got it all installed - and then the wireless dongle was not recognised by Windows 10. This is apparently not a particularly unusual problem. If you get this, you have to basically just keep downloading and trying the various possible driver files and manually install them right up until one of them finally gets recognised (since only one of the files will match for a specific windows built version).
But now, I effectively have a console experience on my TV with two controllers for a total cost of ~R2000. Plus my games are pretty cheap (Mortal Combat X was R100 at the last steam sale, Overcooked cost me R75 at the same time etc).
Oh, and if you got this far, thanks for reading to the end
I can at least promise that the time it took you to read this far is a lot less time than it took me to research and get the whole thing up and running.....
