# Steam Remote Play (streaming) and audio



## Blue|Fusion (Oct 25, 2022)

Hello all,

I finally got around to getting Steam on my HTPC running 13.1-RELEASE-p2 and am having an issue I can't figure out how to go about diagnosing or solving.  Steam itself works fine.  Being a lazy, old Intel i5-4xxx series with the integrated GPU only, I use my Linux desktop as the Steam host to stream from.  This setup worked well when I had Linux on my HTPC, but with this setup I can not get in-game audio on the client HTPC.

For what it's worth, I am running KDE Plasma (kde5 meta package) under X11 with PulseAudio from the official "latest" FreeBSD package repository.  Steam was installed using the linux-steam-utils package and associated instructions.

Please let me know what would be helpful to assist in the diagnosis of this.

Additionally, I tried streaming from a Windows 10 Steam host and the results were no different - no in-game audio.


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## shkhln (Oct 25, 2022)

We disable PulseAudio on the Steam/game side (besides being obnoxious in general, it's prone to crashing with mutex-something issue under Linuxulator with CentOS 7 libs). That in turn means it can't be used for capturing sound, which likely is the feature that Remote Play relies upon. I don't think that would be fixed any time soon.


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## shkhln (Oct 25, 2022)

shkhln said:


> We disable PulseAudio on the Steam/game side (besides being obnoxious in general, it's prone to crashing with mutex-something issue under Linuxulator with CentOS 7 libs). That in turn means it can't be used for capturing sound, which likely is the feature that Remote Play relies upon. I don't think that would be fixed any time soon.


Although, if the direction is specifically Linux -> FreeBSD, then I can't really tell. Never looked into it, never will.


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## Blue|Fusion (Oct 26, 2022)

shkhln said:


> Although, if the direction is specifically Linux -> FreeBSD, then I can't really tell. Never looked into it, never will.


Yes it is Linux -> FreeBSD and also tried Windows -> FreeBSD.  During streaming I see man of these lines in dmesg:

```
linux: jid 0 pid 69643 (SDLAudioP2): unsupported socket(AF_NETLINK, 3, NETLINK_ROUTE)
linux: jid 0 pid 45622 (COfflineMessage): unsupported setsockopt level 6 optname 18
linux: jid 0 pid 70283 (Thread 0x0x2a98): unsupported socket(AF_NETLINK, 3, NETLINK_ROUTE)
linux: jid 0 pid 70283 (SDLAudioP2): unsupported socket(AF_NETLINK, 3, NETLINK_ROUTE)
```

I did a precursory search of some documentation and web search.  I couldn't find anything concrete on if these are critical to the issue or a red herring.

Additionally, I tried running the game Portal on the local FreeBSD machine with the same lack of audio problem.

Installed linux packages

```
rich@htpc:~ % pkg info | grep linux | awk '{print $1}'
drm-kmod-20220907_1
linux-c7-alsa-lib-1.1.8
linux-c7-alsa-plugins-oss-1.1.6_3
linux-c7-atk-2.28.1_1
linux-c7-cairo-1.15.12_1
linux-c7-dbus-libs-1.10.24_3
linux-c7-dri-18.3.4_4
linux-c7-elfutils-libelf-0.176_2
linux-c7-elfutils-libs-0.176_2
linux-c7-expat-2.1.0_4
linux-c7-fontconfig-2.13.0
linux-c7-freetype-2.8_2
linux-c7-fribidi-1.0.2_1
linux-c7-gdk-pixbuf2-2.36.12
linux-c7-graphite2-1.3.10
linux-c7-gtk2-2.24.31
linux-c7-harfbuzz-1.7.5
linux-c7-jasper-libs-1.900.1_5
linux-c7-jbigkit-libs-2.0_2
linux-c7-jpeg-1.2.90_4
linux-c7-libdrm-2.4.97
linux-c7-libgcrypt-1.5.3_4
linux-c7-libglvnd-1.0.1
linux-c7-libgpg-error-1.12_2
linux-c7-libpciaccess-0.14
linux-c7-libpng-1.5.13_3
linux-c7-libthai-0.1.14_1
linux-c7-libtiff-4.0.3_5
linux-c7-lz4-1.8.3
linux-c7-nspr-4.25.0
linux-c7-nss-3.53.1
linux-c7-pango-1.42.4_1
linux-c7-pixman-0.34.0
linux-c7-sqlite-3.7.17_2
linux-c7-systemd-libs-219_10
linux-c7-wayland-1.15.0
linux-c7-xorg-libs-7.7_9
linux-steam-utils-20220115
linux_base-c7-7.9.2009
linuxlibertine-g-20120116_2
```

kldstat:

```
rich@htpc:~ % kldstat
Id Refs Address                Size Name
 1  117 0xffffffff80200000  1f30590 kernel
 2    1 0xffffffff82132000     a158 cryptodev.ko
 3    1 0xffffffff8213d000   5b93a0 zfs.ko
 4    1 0xffffffff832f9000   158438 i915kms.ko
 5    1 0xffffffff83452000    7f020 drm.ko
 6    2 0xffffffff834d2000     cbc8 linuxkpi_gplv2.ko
 7    1 0xffffffff834df000     3378 acpi_wmi.ko
 8    1 0xffffffff834e3000     3250 ichsmb.ko
 9    1 0xffffffff834e7000     2180 smbus.ko
10    1 0xffffffff834ea000     7638 if_bridge.ko
11    1 0xffffffff834f2000     50d8 bridgestp.ko
12    1 0xffffffff834f8000     4d00 ng_ubt.ko
13    6 0xffffffff834fd000     aac8 netgraph.ko
14    2 0xffffffff83508000     a238 ng_hci.ko
15    4 0xffffffff83513000     25a8 ng_bluetooth.ko
16    1 0xffffffff83516000     2340 uhid.ko
17    1 0xffffffff83519000     4350 ums.ko
18    1 0xffffffff8351e000     3380 usbhid.ko
19    1 0xffffffff83522000     31f8 hidbus.ko
20    1 0xffffffff83526000     3320 wmt.ko
21    1 0xffffffff8352a000     e250 ng_l2cap.ko
22    1 0xffffffff83539000    1bee8 ng_btsocket.ko
23    1 0xffffffff83555000     39c0 ng_socket.ko
24    1 0xffffffff83559000     2a08 mac_ntpd.ko
25    1 0xffffffff8355c000     4700 nullfs.ko
26    1 0xffffffff83561000     3a64 if_epair.ko
27    1 0xffffffff83565000    38070 linux.ko
28    4 0xffffffff8359e000    10ab0 linux_common.ko
29    1 0xffffffff835af000    32208 linux64.ko
30    1 0xffffffff835e2000     2260 pty.ko
31    1 0xffffffff835e5000     3530 fdescfs.ko
32    1 0xffffffff835e9000     639c linprocfs.ko
33    1 0xffffffff835f0000     3284 linsysfs.ko
34    1 0xffffffff835f4000     2220 cpuctl.ko
```

Related mounts:

```
rich@htpc:~ % mount | grep /compat/
linsysfs on /compat/linux/sys (linsysfs, local)
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)
devfs on /compat/linux/dev (devfs)
fdescfs on /compat/linux/dev/fd (fdescfs)
tmpfs on /compat/linux/dev/shm (tmpfs, local)
```


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## shkhln (Oct 26, 2022)

Blue|Fusion said:


> Additionally, I tried running the game Portal on the local FreeBSD machine with the same lack of audio problem.


Do you have any audio at all?


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## Blue|Fusion (Oct 26, 2022)

shkhln said:


> Do you have any audio at all?



Good question but yes audio works fine with Kodi, mpv, and Firefox - all latest pkg binaries.


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