Last week I ranted about how I wished I could play Black Desert Online on my TV in the living room. Then a few evenings ago I stumbled on a Reddit post about getting the game running through Steam and then using In-Home Streaming to pipe it elsewhere.

And so my willpower crumbled. Yesterday I purchased a copy of Black Desert Online. So far I’ve mostly had headaches. First I couldn’t get the store to work in Chrome. Switched browsers and bought the game. Then I started patching and left for the afternoon, and the patcher crapped out about 3 seconds after I walked away from the system, as far as I could tell. It was late last night by the time I got a chance to play. I built a Berserker who looked rough but OK in the character creator, but stumbled around like a muppet in game. So I deleted him, only to find out it takes a DAY to delete a character. He’ll finally be gone sometime after midnight tonight.

This morning I created a new character (at least they give us 4 slots) and got him logged in, then I set to work getting the game running through Steam following the steps in that link above. Unfortunately Step 2, “Make sure you enable the Steam Overlay. This is required to recognize the controller.” isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I bounced around a bunch of links before I found a system that worked for me, outlined in another reddit post.

So at that point I could launch BDO from Steam, open the Steam overlay and close it again, and everything seemed peachy. Going back to reddit post #1 I proceeded to the final step. I started streaming from the Steam Link. I’d already attached a bluetooth keyboard, wireless mouse and a PS4 controller so I was set for controls. I minimized Big Picture and alt-tabbed over to BDO and the game was running. I could move around as expected but… I had no audio.

Three hours later and about 40 trips up and down the stairs, I still have no audio. I’ve found posts where people claim they don’t even really use Steam. They start the stream, minimize Steam and just launch BDO normally. That works for me too but still no sound. Basically Steam refuses to transmit sound to BDO or the desktop or, I suspect, any non-Steam game.

[Update: I should point out that when I stream bona-fide Steam games, sound works perfectly. It just seems to be when I get outside of the Steam ecosystem that I have problems.]

So I’m stumped. I’ve found plenty of posts from people who say that they have this working in a number of ways but I just can’t get it to work. When the stream starts, Steam mutes sound on the host computer and is supposed to pipe it to the client. It does do the mute thing, and I’ve even tried unmuting sound on the host but it doesn’t help. I just want a straight pipe to the Steam Link; I don’t care if audio continues to play on the host.

I figure there’s a setting somewhere that I’m not finding but like I said… 3 hours of trying different things. Life is too short. I guess I just flushed $30 down the toilet, at least until someone smarter than me comes up with a solution.

Anyone have any experience with this? So very frustrating (though in fairness I’m trying to do something not officially supported by Steam or BDO).

[SOLVED: OK this is embarrassing. I discovered the problem and it was all me. I mentioned I hooked up a wireless mouse to the Steam Link. When I did that, I picked the Link up to plug in the wireless dongle for the mouse, and I guess I jarred the HDMI cable loose. It FINALLY dawned on me, after hours of messing around, that the Link wasn’t making any clicks or anything while I was moving through menus, even before I connected to the host PC. Which finally led me to think about why it was totally silent and finally went to what should’ve been Step 1: check the cable connections.

Boy am I embarrassed but at least it is working!]