I thought this might be useful as more and more people have gotten their Frames (me included), and many more will be getting theirs.
Me and many others have run into some problems using their Frame, so a thread listing common problems and their solutions is a no-brainer.
Right eye ghosting
This is a known issue. It manifests as “ghosting” of bright parts of the image (menus and text usually) but only in the right eye view, and only when streaming wired or wireless. It persists regardless of streaming, framerate or projection settings. It affects not just the Frame, but other headsets like the Quests as well.
The fix is currently in the beta branch, update SteamVR on both your host system and the Frame to fix it.
Dongle not detected
The wifi chip in the dongle requires kernel 7.2 or newer. I was on the LTS kernel on my Endeavour OS install, so that was one part of the problem.
Valve has a troubleshooting script for linux users available, which for me revealed that my system had no regulatory region set.
On arch this is fixed by installing the wireless-regdb package, which provides region data. Then setting your region in /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom by uncommenting your country.
After a reboot, the dongle shows up!
Dongle doesn’t pair
For some reason, pairing does not seem to work when attempting it from the streaming toggle button inside the Frame.
However, if I navigate to the “Remote Play” section in settings on my Frame, and do it from there, it works immediately.
Streaming stutter
My streams did not start off perfect. I’ve done many things to improve it, most of which are relevant to my particular router and hence not applicable to everyone.
But in general, it seems that for 6Ghz, 160Mhz channel width works better than 320Mhz. Also having ANY other device on the same connection can cause stutter. I also improved things by disabling some power saving features on the router side.
I’ve not messed with the dongle much, as I have a far more powerful router with much better coverage of my play space. Using it for the 6Ghz connection did not seem to work better than the router for me, but I’ve seen others get the best result by using ONLY the dongle, and disabling the LAN+WiFi stream entirely.
SteamVR desktop mirroring does not work
This seems to simply be broken on linux?
I’m using WayVR for this instead. You can add it to Steam so you can launch it from the Frame after starting a stream from your PC.
Other problems or solutions to bring up? Comment please!
Would you be able to share more info about the WiFi settings?
We are using the U7-pro-max, the SSID WiFuis set to 5Ghz and 6Ghz. Power to max, and bandwidth to 160. WPA3 only. Seems to play fine, but there is an 10ms added delay with the wired AP compared to dongle.
We had huge problems setting up two frames in one room. Some feedback for others to check:
- The dongle needs usb 3.0(+) for bandwidth. Usb 2 seem to give some weird stutters.
- Dongle location is important, just like the Vive trackers. Try and use a (proper) extension cable to get a bit away from your case and closet to line of sight.
- Current steamVr works BS on windows and Linux when it’s not the beta. I recommend the beta version currently, also for ‘Space Calibrator’
For us it seems multilink streaming with 2 frames and 6 vive trackers is no working ‘good enough’. When one boots the other has a small stutter, but that’s it. Looking at wifi bands I don’t think you can have more than 3 frames in one room, but I don’t have the experience for that atm.
You should create separate SSIDs for 6GHz and 5GHz, you want to stick to one or the other for the WiFi link. When using multi-link, the dongle will switch to whichever is not being used by the WiFi connection (Or always 6GHz, if the option to reserve it for the dongle is enabled). You are not using two 6GHz connections, it’s always 5+6GHz, as the Frame can only do two different connections at the same time. (Maybe that’s why you incorrectly assume 3 frames is the maximum in a room?)
Your router connection being a tad worse is probably because the frames are using 5GHz there (assuming the dongles are on 6GHz), and doing so on the same router? You’ll probably get better results disabling multi-link, and using only the dongles.
Transmit power is not the final say on the router side, check for features like “airtime fairness” and “transmission bursting” that trade latency for other things.
You can absolutely have more than 3 frames in a room, though for that kind of setup, you’d want to configure each of them to use specific, non-overlapping 6GHz channels (which is tricky as the dongles use hidden SSIDs that can’t see each other, and therefore avoid channel overlap). And you would need to use the dongle for this, as otherwise you’d need to get one router for each Frame, to enable them being on different channels.
You’d also want to disable multi-link, as again, to use it effectively you’d need both a dedicated router for each headset, as well as a dongle, in order for all connections to use separate channels.
But, this means that at 160MHz channel width, you can have up to 7 (in the US) Frames in the same space, (and technically also give each a 5GHz multi-link connection) each using an entirely separate and dedicated 6GHz connection. You might even be able to drop to 80MHz and do 14 Frames. The bandwidth should be sufficient.
Though when this saturated, you’d have so many people and their devices around, that people’s phones and PCs scanning for WiFi will cause interference. It might become necessary for people to put their other devices in airplane mode to stop them sending hotspot queries in the 6GHz range.
Vive trackers operate at much smaller datarates, and use the 2.4GHz range, they should not interfere with Frame streams.
Yhea we know we’ll what the limits of the Vive trackers are xD, I needed to reprogram some smart home stuff to be able to go thought the blackout of us going in VR, having 10 trackers was already enough for more than half of packages being lost, and going to 20 there is just no wifi anymore.
Starting to learn the ins and our of the Frame. I will try and play around a bit more with the 5Ghz and 6Ghz on the AP, I could get our second AP online too and try just using one AP for each heatset. But that would mean moving it around. We will see how testing goes.
Do note that in good conditions, multi-link really isn’t needed, and if one of the connections is bad, disabling it can actually improve things.
You can manually set the channels for the dongles, you have to enable custom in Remote Play settings inside the Frame, there you can set a custom SSID, channel, etc.
Good post, I’m pinning it to the community for awhile.
Neat!
It’s interesting that an unset region for the dongle causes issues, as it has generally not been a problem with wifi adapters in the past for me. Must be something specific to this adapter, or it’s interaction with the Frame.
EDIT: It seems that 6GHz is disabled in the world domain, according to this NixOS wiki article, so that would explain the benefit of setting the region.
6GHz is not globally legal. That part of the spectrum is used for other stuff, too, not just wifi. Unless software (and in some cases hardware) can verify in some way that they are in a region where that spectrum is allowed to be used, they won’t put out a single signal in that range. Phones and laptops often check whether other 6GHz devices are around. If they are, they will usually allow you to at least connect to 6GHz networks, simply assuming that if devices that create such networks are nearby, then they must be legal wherever you are.
But the dongle CREATES the 6Ghz network. That’s why it needs to be extra sure. That is also why the warning on the Arch wiki page I linked about ABSOLUTELY NOT setting your region to anything other than what it actually is, is so serious.
There currently is no lying down mode available in SteamVR. I would be much obliged if anyone had a workaround and/or could upvote the issue on Github. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/970
Has anyone been able to get their view really dialed in so that things like text are super sharp and without any fringing? Maybe I’m just expecting too much from the resolution, or perhaps I’m not getting my IPD fully dialed in.
Speaking of IPD, the specs say “IPD target range 60mm - 70mm”, but the IPD on mine adjusts from about 58mm to about 69.4mm. Has anyone else noticed their IPD range be slightly off from the specs? I wonder if the “target” implies that it won’t be exactly the range, but somewhere around that.
Since the Frame uses pancake lenses, it is much more forgiving of IPD compared to fresnel lenses (the older, more common type). So it’s probably just expectations, although you might have an IPD that is outside the range (there are ways to physically measure this).
Thanks. I think I’m right around the widest limit. I just read earlier that pancake lenses are quite forgiving of IPD, so it’s probably not that. I guess I just had higher expectations of how sharp things would look.
Yeah, mine’s off as well. Haven’t measured my eyes but I dialed it up as much as possible (69,8 or so) and it’s still not great. Have read of many others who did measure their own IPD and they had something between 70 and 75.
Interesting, thanks! I just measured myself with a measuring tape in front of a mirror, so not very precise, but I seem to be right around 70mm.
To add non-Steam games you can use the commandline tool
steamos-add-to-steam. You have to adjust it to be able to add apk files. Just add “application/vnd.android.package-archive” to the list at the bottom.
