Chiaki

Chiaki

Chiaki is a free and open-source client for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 Remote Play protocol. It streams the picture and sound of your own console to a computer and lets you control games with a gamepad or with the keyboard, in the same way as Sony's official Remote Play application. The program was created by Florian Märkl, is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 and is not endorsed or certified by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Chiaki lets you stream and play games from your own PS4 or PS5 on a PC over your home network, as an alternative to Sony's Remote Play app.

Features

1. Cross-Platform Support: Chiaki builds are provided for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and Nintendo Switch, and the program can also be compiled for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The Android version is also available from F-Droid.

2. Console Discovery: if the console is on the local network and is turned on or in standby mode, Chiaki finds it automatically; otherwise you add it manually by entering its IP address after clicking the "+" icon.

3. Console Registration: each console is registered once with your PSN Account ID and a PIN that the console shows under Settings - Remote Play - Add Device on a PS4 or Link Device on a PS5. Since PS4 system software 7.0 the Account ID is required instead of the Online ID, and the project provides a Python script that obtains it after you log in to PSN.

4. Remote Play: double-clicking a registered console in the main window starts a streaming session in a separate window.

5. Stream Settings: resolution, frame rate (30 or 60 fps), bitrate and the video codec (H.264, or H.265 on the PS5 only) can be selected in the settings.

6. Controller Support: game controllers are handled through the SDL library, so common gamepads can be used for playing.

7. Keyboard Mapping: every PlayStation button, the D-pad, L1/L2/R1/R2, the touchpad and the analog sticks can be assigned to keys in the Key Settings section.

8. Hardware Decoding: video can be decoded with a selectable hardware decode method to reduce the load on the processor.

9. Audio Settings: the audio output device and the audio buffer size for the stream can be chosen in the settings.

10. Portable Windows Build: the Windows version comes as a .zip archive; you extract it and run chiaki.exe without installation.

Conclusion

Chiaki is a lightweight alternative to the official Remote Play application for playing PS4 and PS5 games on a computer at home. According to its author, all relevant features are implemented and the project is now in maintenance mode only, with no major updates planned. The community fork chiaki-ng ("next generation") continues active development with new features.