Good lord, have I finally found the point where my in-home stream seems to fail? The windowunmap command removes the black screen and shows what should be the stream from my desktop and suddenly enables the streamed sound, so I think it's fair to say I'm having the same issues as @silverhammermba reports.
I too am starting steam in bigpicture mode using xinit, but with all options directly on the commandline in an upstart script (all of this on an ubuntu sever machine without a desktop environment):
/usr/bin/xinit /bin/su -c "/usr/games/steam -bigpicture" akaidiot -- :0
Steam itself runs fine and reacts to all of the input from the 360-controller, but when I start streaming a game, the screen turns black. I can hear steam react to the A-button at that point, I'm assuming it's still controlling the steam app in the background. Just tested this using steam package version 1424971303 on the host (running on Linux Mint 17 with NVIDIA binary driver, version 331.113) and presumably the same version on the client (running on Ubuntu 14.04.2 Server with the latest mesa drivers from ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers) (both just updated).
It'd be awesome if the way steam does it's window handling can be made to support this use case, making steam actually useful on my HTPC.
I don't think steam is designed to be run without a window manager. I have steam autostart in openbox and that works nicely.
I suppose that's true. Openbox seems like a really minimalistic wm, got steam to run, pass around focus properly and have a game actually playable with that. So thanks for the suggestion :D
Nothing extracted yet.
I'm starting Steam using xinit and the following
~/.xinitrcThis works perfectly except that window focus is not passed around correctly i.e. when starting a game (or streaming) big picture mode goes black but the game window isn't shown. I can force it to work by sending X11 commands after launching the game
And then when exiting the game I can undo the steps: map steam and focus it.
I know this is a little unorthodox (and unmapping Steam is probably not the right way to go about this), but it would be super awesome if Steam could handle this itself. It would make it much easier to set up a SteamOS-like environment using just big picture mode.