Kodi HTPC Software Is Being Ported To Run On Valve's Steam Link

Earlier this month Valve released the Steam Link SDK for opening up this Linux-powered $50 device with Qt, SDL, and OpenGL ES support.While the Steam Link is a device intended for streaming Steam games to your television, one of the interesting ports so far with this SDK is aiming to get the Kodi HTPC software running on the Link.

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us today that a Valve developer, Sam Lantinga, who is particularly known for his work on SDL, has been working to port Kodi to the Steam Link via their open-source SDK.

There is also this Steam Community thread about the port, which seems to indicate it's still very much a work-in-progress and isn't yet ready for end-users. With the current code, Kodi is running painfully slow on the Steam Link due to Kodi not yet supporting video hardware acceleration on the device.

The Steam Link is powered by a single-core ARMv7 CPU at 1GHz, has about 256MB of available RAM, and 500MB of usable flash storage. So even if video acceleration does come about, the Steam Link won't be the best choice for a HTPC box unless you plan on streaming all of your content. Nevertheless, it's an interesting port with the Steam Link selling for just $50 USD.