PS Remote Play 2026: 1080p HQ in 12 Steps, 30 Min

Remote Play is the most useful thing your PlayStation does that Sony can barely be bothered to explain. Strip away the marketing and it is gloriously simple: your PS5 or PS4 renders the game exactly as it always would, encodes the video on the console's own silicon, and throws the stream at whatever screen you point it at — a laptop, a phone, a Steam Deck, a 200-dollar handheld with Sony's name printed on the back. The console does the work. The client is a window with a controller taped to it.

Done right, it is the closest thing to unplugging your living-room console and carrying it into the office, the kitchen, or a hotel two thousand miles away. Done wrong, it is a fifteen-frame-per-second smear that makes you wonder why you bothered. The gap between those two outcomes is almost never the software. It is your network, three console settings, and whether you understood what you actually switched on. This guide takes you from nothing to a clean 1080p stream in twelve steps, covers the official app on every platform, the PlayStation Portal's 1080p High Quality mode from the March 2026 update, and the open-source Chiaki-ng client for everyone whose hardware Sony forgot. Then it fixes the eight things that will go wrong, because they will.

What Remote Play Actually Is

Before you touch a menu, understand what you are building, because Sony ships two different features under one confusing umbrella and half the internet's Remote Play complaints are people using the wrong one.

Remote Play vs. Cloud Streaming: two different pipes

Remote Play streams your own console. The PS5 sitting in your house renders the frame, its encoder squeezes it into H.264 or H.265, and it ships that stream over your network to the client. The game, the save data, the disc in the tray — all of it lives on the box at home. Remote Play is free. It has always been free. It needs no subscription of any kind.

Cloud Streaming is the other thing. There, the game runs on Sony's servers in a data center and your console is irrelevant — it can be switched off, unplugged, or across an ocean. Cloud Streaming requires a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription, full stop. When the PlayStation Portal picked up full PS5 cloud streaming in the 6.0.0 system update on November 5, 2025, Sony quoted a catalog of around 2,800 digitally owned PS5 titles you could stream from the cloud without ever waking your console. That is a genuinely big deal, and it is also not Remote Play. Keep the two straight and ninety percent of forum confusion evaporates. The official PlayStation Remote Play page covers the free path; the Portal system-software page tracks the Cloud Streaming one.

The latency you will actually get

Let me pre-empt the marketing you will read elsewhere: nobody is streaming a console to a handheld at “2 milliseconds.” That number is physically illiterate. A Remote Play frame has to be rendered, encoded, pushed through your router, carried across the air or the wire, decoded on the client, and painted on a panel. On a clean wired-console LAN with a 5 GHz client, honest glass-to-glass latency lands somewhere around 25 to 40 milliseconds. That is excellent — comfortably playable for anything that is not a frame-perfect fighting game — but it is not zero, and anyone quoting single-digit milliseconds is quoting a LAN round-trip ping, not the thing your thumbs feel. The honest, defensible claim is this: local Remote Play beats Cloud Streaming on responsiveness because the pipe is shorter and the encoder is closer, and both live or die on network quality rather than app choice.

A short history, because the lore matters

Remote Play is old. Sony first shipped it in 2006 between the PS3 and the PSP; the PS Vita made it a headline feature; the PS4 era brought the first proper Windows and Mac apps around 2016 (so no, PC support is not a 2025 novelty, whatever a content mill tells you); PS5 Remote Play arrived in early November 2020; and the dedicated PlayStation Portal handheld landed in November 2023. Meanwhile, a developer known as thestr4ng3r reverse-engineered the Remote Play protocol into an open-source client called Chiaki, which a maintainer named streetpea forked and modernized into chiaki4deck and then Chiaki-ng — the reason a Steam Deck or a Linux box can do everything the official app does and several things it will not. If you still run a PS4 as a secondary Remote Play target, it remains perfectly valid hardware; our look at why the PS4 outsold the Xbox One two-to-one explains why so many of those boxes are still humming.

Prerequisites: Versions and Bandwidth

Remote Play forgives almost nothing about your network and almost everything about your hardware. Here is the exact shopping list before you start.

Console and system software

You need a PS5, PS5 Pro, PS4, or PS4 Pro running the latest system software. “Latest” is not optional Sony boilerplate here — the registration handshake and the newer codecs depend on it, and an out-of-date console will fail to pair with a current client for reasons the error message will never explain. Update the console first, before anything else. The PS5 additionally needs to be either powered on or in Rest Mode with two specific network features enabled, which we cover in Step 2.

Client hardware and app versions

Pick your window. The current builds, verified for 2026:

CONSOLE      PS5 / PS5 Pro / PS4 / PS4 Pro   (latest system software)
CLIENT       Windows 10 / 11 ... PS Remote Play 9.0.0.02120
             macOS ........... PS Remote Play (latest)
             Android 10+ ..... app updated 2026-05-20
             iOS / iPadOS .... PS Remote Play (latest)
             PS Portal ....... 8-inch 1080p 60Hz LCD, software 6.0.0+
             Steam Deck /  ... chiaki-ng 1.10.0
             Linux / Switch     (also Windows, macOS, Android)
CONTROLLER   DualSense / DualShock 4
             NOT usable: PS VR2, PS VR, PlayStation Move, PS Camera
NETWORK      5 Mbps minimum / 15 Mbps recommended -- upload AND download
ACCOUNT      Same PSN account everywhere.
             PS Plus Premium ONLY for Cloud Streaming (not Remote Play).

The Windows app is at version 9.0.0.02120 and runs on Windows 10 or 11 (older Windows has been tested but is unsupported). The Android app was refreshed on May 20, 2026 and requires Android 10 or later. The Portal is an 8-inch 1080p 60 Hz LCD with a DualSense's guts split around it; make sure its system software is 6.0.0 or newer or half this guide does not apply. Note the hard exclusion: any title that requires PS VR2, the original PS VR, the PlayStation Camera, or Move controllers cannot run over Remote Play, because those peripherals cannot be presented to the console remotely. Neither can you run Share Play, PS Plus Premium streaming, or a broadcast at the same time as a Remote Play session — they contend for the same encoder pipeline.

The network, where this feature lives or dies

Sony's official figures are a 5 Mbps minimum and 15 Mbps recommended, and those apply to both upload and download — upload matters at the console's end, download at the client's. Take the minimum with suspicion. At exactly 5 Mbps you get a 1080p slideshow with the color depth of a wet newspaper; 15 Mbps is where the picture stops apologizing for itself, and the Portal's new High Quality mode wants every bit of that headroom. Wire the console to the router with Ethernet if you physically can. Put the client on 5 GHz Wi-Fi, not the congested 2.4 GHz band. If you plan to play away from home, read the ports section before you leave, and check Sony's list of when Remote Play is unavailable so you are not debugging a feature that was never going to work on that hotel captive portal.

Steps 1-3: Enable It on the Console

Everything starts at the console. These three steps take about four minutes and are the ones people skip and then blame the app for.

Step 1 — Enable Remote Play

1. Turn Remote Play on at the console. On PS5, go to Settings > System > Remote Play and switch Enable Remote Play to on. On PS4, it lives at Settings > Remote Play Connection Settings > Enable Remote Play. Why: the feature ships disabled. Every client on earth will discover the console, attempt to connect, and be politely refused until this toggle is flipped, and the failure looks identical to a network problem, so people waste hours here.

Step 2 — Make the console reachable in Rest Mode

2. Configure Rest Mode so the console can wake and stay online. On PS5, open Settings > System > Power Saving > Features Available in Rest Mode and enable both Stay Connected to the Internet and Enable Turning On PS5 from Network. On PS4 the equivalent lives under Settings > Power Save Settings > Set Features Available in Rest Mode. Why: without these, the console drops off the network the moment it naps, and your beautifully configured client connects to nothing. With them, you can wake a sleeping console from your laptop across the house or the country.

Step 3 — Generate the Link Device PIN

3. Produce the pairing PIN. On PS5, go to Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device; on PS4, Settings > Remote Play Connection Settings > Add Device. The console shows an eight-digit number. Why: this PIN is the one-time secret that binds a specific client to your console and account. It is time-limited — you have roughly five minutes — and it is the single most common point of failure in the whole process, because people generate it, wander off to install the app, and let it expire.

Here is what the console should be showing you at the end of these three steps:

PS5:  Settings > System > Remote Play
        Enable Remote Play ................ [ON]
      Settings > System > Power Saving >
      Features Available in Rest Mode
        Stay Connected to the Internet ... [ON]
        Enable Turning On PS5 from Network  [ON]

      Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device
        +--------------------------------+
        |   PIN:  4821 7735              |
        |   Enter this on your device.   |
        |   Expires in ~5 minutes.       |
        +--------------------------------+

PS4:  Settings > Remote Play Connection Settings
        Enable Remote Play ................ [ON]
        Add Device .......................  PIN: 4821 7735

Steps 4-8: The Official App

The official PS Remote Play app is the path of least resistance on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It is free, it is signed by Sony, and it is boring in the best way. Sony maintains a walkthrough for the desktop versions on its PC and Mac support page, updated as of June 2026, but here is the version with the reasoning intact.

Step 4 — Install the right build

4. Download PS Remote Play for your platform and install it. On Windows that is 9.0.0.02120 or newer from Sony's official download; on Android, the app updated May 20, 2026 (Android 10+); on iOS and macOS, the latest from the respective store. Why: the app must match the console's protocol generation. A stale build — the one that has sat in your Downloads folder since 2023 — will connect, negotiate, and then drop with a cryptic error, and you will blame everything except the version number. Get it fresh.

Steps 5-6 — Sign in and pair

5. Sign in with the same PSN account as the console. Launch the app and log in. Why: Remote Play authenticates the client against the account that owns the console. A different account — a family member's, a second region's — will be refused at the handshake, no matter how correct everything else is.
6. Enter the eight-digit PIN from Step 3. The app searches your local network, finds the console, and asks for the PIN. Type it before it expires. Why: this is the registration that stores a key on the client so you never need the PIN again on this device. Do it once per client, on the same LAN as the console for the smoothest first pairing, and every future connection is one click.

Steps 7-8 — Connect and tune

7. Connect and confirm the stream negotiates cleanly. The app wakes the console (if it is in Rest Mode) and starts streaming. Why: the first successful frame is your proof that all three console settings, the account, and the network agree. If it connects on the LAN but fails later from outside, the problem is network reachability, not setup — jump to the ports section.
8. Set resolution and frame rate in the app's settings. In PS Remote Play, open Settings and choose your target resolution (up to 1080p) and 60 fps. Why: the app defaults conservatively. On a solid connection you want 1080p / 60; on a weak one, drop to 720p rather than suffer the adaptive encoder thrashing between resolutions mid-firefight.

A healthy first connection produces output conceptually like this — the app does not print a literal log, but this is what it is doing under the hood, and it is worth knowing the shape of a good handshake:

[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Signing in to PSN .......... OK
[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Searching local network ...
[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Found console: PS5-2F3A  (192.168.1.42)
[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Registering with PIN ....... OK (device linked)
[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Negotiating stream:
      codec ........ H.265 (HEVC)
      resolution ... 1080p
      frame rate ... 60
      bitrate ...... ~12 Mbps (adaptive)
[PS Remote Play 9.0.0] Connected. Glass-to-glass ~30 ms on LAN.

Steps 9-12: Portal and 1080p HQ

The PlayStation Portal is the odd one out: it is a dedicated Remote Play client with no browser, no store apps, and no purpose in life beyond streaming your PS5. Since late 2025 it also does Cloud Streaming, and since March 2026 it can finally push a real 1080p bitrate. If you own one, these four steps matter more than everything above. If you want the deeper Portal-only walkthrough, we cover it in the dedicated 1080p HQ guide.

Step 9 — Update the Portal

9. Update the Portal to the current software. Connect it to Wi-Fi and let it pull the latest system software — at minimum 6.0.0 (November 5, 2025), which added Cloud Streaming for around 2,800 PS5 titles, 3D Audio support for compatible headsets, a redesigned home screen, and an optional device passcode. Then take the March 17, 2026 update on top (rolling out March 17 PDT / March 18 CET and JST) that adds the 1080p High Quality mode. Why: 1080p High Quality does not exist before that March build. If your Portal cannot find the setting in Step 12, this is why — you are on old software.

Steps 10-11 — Remote Play or Cloud Streaming

10. Decide which pipe you are using. On the Portal home screen, choose Remote Play (stream your own console) or Cloud Streaming (run the game on Sony's servers). Why: Remote Play is free and lower-latency but needs your console awake; Cloud Streaming works with the console off but requires PlayStation Plus Premium and only covers the eligible catalog. Picking the wrong one is the source of most “why won't my game load” confusion on the Portal.
11. Learn the new PS button behavior. As of the 6.0.0 update, Sony rewired the Portal's PS button: per the patch notes it no longer reaches back to control the PS5 directly and instead always opens the Portal's quick-menu sidebar. Why: muscle memory from the old firmware will fight you here. The quick menu is now your hub for resolution, connection info, and session control — which is exactly where the next step lives.

Step 12 — Turn on 1080p High Quality

12. Enable 1080p High Quality and restart the session. During a session, press the PS button to open the Quick Menu, then go to Max Resolution and select 1080p High Quality. Restart the session to apply it. Why: the mode raises the stream's bitrate above the default 1080p Standard, which is the actual difference between “1080p” and “1080p that looks like 1080p.” It applies to both Remote Play and Cloud Streaming, and it is bandwidth-hungry — this is the setting that needs Sony's recommended 15 Mbps, not the 5 Mbps floor.

# On the PlayStation Portal, DURING an active session:
Press PS button  ->  Quick Menu (sidebar)
  Quick Menu > Max Resolution > 1080p High Quality
  -> "Restart the session to apply the change."

# Resolution modes, low to high bitrate:
#   540p  ->  720p  ->  1080p Standard  ->  1080p High Quality
#
# 5 Mbps  = the minimum; Standard is the realistic ceiling there.
# 15 Mbps = recommended; where High Quality earns its name.

The full details of that March 2026 build — including that it touches Cloud Streaming's bundle UI, trophy displays, and QR-code sign-in alongside the resolution mode — are on the official PlayStation Blog post. Note that the blog does not attach a public version number to the 1080p HQ update, so anyone quoting you an exact firmware string for it is guessing.

The Enthusiast Path: Chiaki-ng

Now the good part. If your client is a Steam Deck, a Linux desktop, a homebrewed Switch, a Raspberry Pi, or anything else Sony's app store ignores, you use Chiaki-ng — the maintained open-source Remote Play client at github.com/streetpea/chiaki-ng, currently version 1.10.0 (April 3, 2026). It is a clean-room implementation of the same protocol the official app uses. It is not endorsed by Sony — the repository says so on its front page — and it connects with your own account and your own console PIN, which is precisely why it is the enthusiast's tool rather than a piracy vector: it does nothing you are not already entitled to do.

Why bother when the official app exists

Three reasons. First, coverage: Chiaki-ng runs where the official app does not, and on a Steam Deck it turns Sony's whole library into a portable one — if you are weighing that Deck against Nintendo's hardware, our Switch 2 versus Steam Deck breakdown is the context. Second, control: it exposes bitrate, codec, hardware decoder, and audio buffer as first-class settings the official app buries or omits. Third, honesty: it will happily let you push a 30 Mbps stream on a LAN the official app caps out of caution. The trade is that you configure it yourself, and the documentation, thankfully, is excellent — the Chiaki-ng configuration docs are the authoritative reference and worth a read before you deviate from the defaults.

Registering: Account-ID and the eight-digit PIN

Registration is where newcomers stumble, because Chiaki-ng needs your PSN Account-ID — a 64-bit number, Base64-encoded — and that is emphatically not your Online-ID, the display name your friends see. The good news: modern Chiaki-ng fetches the Account-ID for you. In the app, open Settings (the gear), go to the Consoles tab, and click Register. You get two buttons: PSN Login, which runs an OAuth sign-in and pulls the ID automatically (use this), or Public Lookup, which resolves the ID from your Online-ID. Then you feed it the same eight-digit PIN from the console's Link Device screen.

# PSN Account-ID: a 64-bit value, Base64-encoded.
# It is NOT your Online-ID (the name friends see).
# chiaki-ng retrieves it for you during registration:
#
#   Settings (gear) > Consoles > Register
#     [PSN Login]      OAuth sign-in, pulls the ID  (recommended)
#     [Public Lookup]  type your Online-ID to resolve it
#
# A valid Account-ID is 12 Base64 chars ending in '=', e.g.:
Account-ID:  5wRz1nQ2Ab8=
Console PIN: 4821 7735
#   PIN from: PS5 Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device
#             PS4 Settings > Remote Play Connection > Add Device

Recommended settings

Once registered, tune it. For a PS5, the docs and hard experience agree: 1080p, 60 fps, H.265, and a 30 Mbps bitrate on a good LAN. For a PS4, drop to 720p / 60 (a PS4 Pro can manage 1080p). Hardware decoding on, always — software decoding a 1080p60 HEVC stream will melt a handheld's battery and add latency for no benefit.

chiaki-ng  ->  Settings (gear)  ->  Video / Stream tab
  Resolution ......... 1080p         # PS5. PS4: 720p; PS4 Pro can do 1080p
  FPS ................ 60
  Codec .............. H.265 (HEVC)   # H.265 HDR only if the client supports HDR
  Bitrate ............ 30000 Kbps     # 0 = auto; 30 Mbps is the sane LAN ceiling
  Hardware decoder ... auto / on      # vaapi, vulkan, videotoolbox, d3d11va
  Audio buffer ....... default        # raise only if audio crackles

Consoles tab:  console registered with Account-ID + Console PIN above
Config tab:    Manage Profiles  (per-console overrides live here)

Playing Off-Network: Ports and NAT

On your home LAN, Remote Play just works — discovery is automatic and there is nothing to forward. The moment you leave the house, the internet's plumbing becomes your problem, and it is worth understanding rather than cargo-culting.

The ports Remote Play actually uses

Remote Play does not tunnel through a single friendly port. It uses a small spread, and if you are forwarding manually to reach a console from outside your network, these are the ones that matter:

# Give the console a STATIC LAN IP first
# (a DHCP reservation on the router, tied to its MAC address).
# Then forward these to that IP:

PROTO  PORT        PURPOSE
TCP    9295        registration + session control
UDP    9296        A/V stream + Senkusha bandwidth probe
UDP    9297        stream feedback / congestion control
UDP    9302        PS5 discovery       (PS4 discovery: UDP 987)

# If the stream is flaky from outside, forward the whole range:
TCP/UDP  9295-9304

# PSN sign-in additionally uses:
#   TCP  80, 443, 3478, 3479, 3480
#   UDP  3478, 3479

Forwarding them, and pinning the console's IP

The order matters. First, give the console a fixed LAN address via a DHCP reservation on your router — forwarding to an address that changes on the next reboot is a self-inflicted wound. Then forward the ports above to that address. UDP 9296 is the important one; it carries the actual audio and video plus the Senkusha bandwidth probe Remote Play uses to size the stream, and if it is blocked you get a connection that authenticates and then produces a black screen. When in doubt, forward the whole 9295–9304 range in both protocols and move on with your life.

When forwarding cannot save you: CGNAT

Here is the wall a lot of people hit and never diagnose: Carrier-Grade NAT. If your ISP puts you behind CGNAT — extremely common on mobile broadband, 5G home internet, and many fiber resellers — you do not own a public IP address, you share one, and no amount of port forwarding on your own router will make your console reachable from outside. There is nothing to forward to. Your options are: ask the ISP for a real public IP (sometimes free, sometimes a fee), run a VPN back to your home network, or simply use Cloud Streaming instead, which sidesteps the whole problem by not needing your console to be reachable at all. Diagnosing CGNAT early saves an entire evening of blaming your firewall.

Common Pitfalls and Fixes

Six failures account for the overwhelming majority of Remote Play misery. None of them are exotic. All of them look, at first, like the app being broken.

Network pitfalls

Pitfall 1 — Wi-Fi on both ends. A console on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi talking to a client on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is two lossy radios in series, and it stutters no matter how fast your plan claims to be. Fix: wire the console to the router with Ethernet, and put the client on 5 GHz. This single change fixes more “laggy Remote Play” complaints than every other tweak combined.

Pitfall 2 — Trusting the 5 Mbps “minimum.” Sony's 5 Mbps floor is technically true and practically a lie for anything demanding. Fix: treat 15 Mbps as your real target, upload and download, and if you are on the Portal's 1080p High Quality mode, do not even attempt it below that. Test the connection where you will actually sit, not next to the router.

Pairing and account pitfalls

Pitfall 3 — The expired PIN. The Link Device PIN dies in about five minutes. Fix: generate it last, with the client already installed, signed in, and waiting on the PIN-entry screen. If it fails, generate a fresh one rather than re-typing the dead one.

Pitfall 4 — Wrong account or region. The client must sign in with the exact PSN account that owns the console. Fix: confirm the account matches on both ends before you touch the PIN. A second-region or family account will fail the handshake with an error that blames the network.

Quality and input pitfalls

Pitfall 5 — Peripheral-locked games. Fire up a PS VR2 title, a Move game, or anything requiring the PlayStation Camera over Remote Play and it will refuse, correctly. Fix: there is no fix — this is a hard limitation. Keep those titles for the couch. The same goes for trying to Share Play or broadcast during a session; the encoder can only do one thing at once.

Pitfall 6 — The console itself is the problem. Sometimes Remote Play is fine and the PS5 underneath it is sludge — slow to wake, dropping the stream, misbehaving after months of uptime. Fix: before you rebuild your entire network, rule out the console. Our walkthrough on clearing the PS5 cache without losing data takes fifteen minutes and resolves a surprising share of “Remote Play randomly disconnects” reports that were never about Remote Play.

Troubleshooting Table

When it breaks, work the table. Match the symptom, check the likely cause, apply the fix — in that order, and do not skip to a network rebuild before you have ruled out the cheap stuff.

Connection failures

Video and audio problems

Input and session problems

Advanced Tips

Once the basics hold, here is where the enthusiasts pull ahead — and where the diminishing returns start, so you know when to stop fiddling and play.

Push the bitrate, and know when not to

The official app hides the bitrate behind an adaptive algorithm that errs conservative. Chiaki-ng hands you the dial, and on a wired-console LAN, 30,000 Kbps is the sweet spot — enough to make 1080p60 genuinely crisp without saturating a normal home network. Going higher rarely helps; the encoder and the panel become the limit before the pipe does. The one time to lower it is a shared or congested network, where a slightly lower, stable bitrate beats a higher one that collapses every time someone else opens a video. Stability beats peak numbers in every case that matters to your thumbs.

Hardware decoding and codecs

Always decode in hardware. Every modern client — Steam Deck, phone, laptop, the Portal itself — has a dedicated video block that eats H.265 for microwatts, and forcing software decode wastes battery and adds latency for zero image-quality gain. Prefer H.265 (HEVC) over H.264 where both ends support it; it delivers the same picture at a lower bitrate, which is free headroom. HDR is worth enabling only if your client actually has an HDR panel — on an SDR screen it is a color-mangling liability, not a feature.

Controllers, latency, and the honest ceiling

A DualSense connected directly to the client (USB or Bluetooth) gives the tightest input path; a controller bridged through a second layer adds latency you will feel in anything twitchy. Accept the physics: even a flawless setup sits around 25–40 ms glass-to-glass on a LAN, and more over the internet. That is fine for RPGs, strategy, most action games, and the entire retro back catalog. It is not fine for ranked fighting-game frame data, and no setting changes that — the speed of light and the encode/decode pipeline are not negotiable. Match your expectations to the medium and Remote Play is a genuinely great way to play; fight the medium and you will be perpetually disappointed.

The Complete Configuration

Here is the whole thing in one block — console, network, official app, Portal, and Chiaki-ng — the working configuration to copy, adapt, and keep. If it matches this, it works.

# ============================================================
#  PS REMOTE PLAY -- COMPLETE WORKING CONFIGURATION (2026)
# ============================================================

# ---- CONSOLE (PS5) ----------------------------------------
Settings > System > Remote Play
  Enable Remote Play ......................... [ON]
Settings > System > Power Saving >
Features Available in Rest Mode
  Stay Connected to the Internet ............. [ON]
  Enable Turning On PS5 from Network ......... [ON]
Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device
  -> generate 8-digit PIN (enter within ~5 min)
System software ............................... LATEST

#   PS4 equivalents:
#   Settings > Remote Play Connection Settings > Enable Remote Play [ON]
#   Settings > Remote Play Connection Settings > Add Device -> PIN

# ---- NETWORK ----------------------------------------------
Console link ....... WIRED Ethernet to router (preferred)
Client link ........ 5 GHz Wi-Fi
Bandwidth .......... 15 Mbps recommended (5 Mbps hard minimum)
Static console IP .. DHCP reservation, e.g. 192.168.1.42
Forward (off-LAN) .. TCP 9295 ; UDP 9296, 9297 ; UDP 9302 (PS4: 987)
                     fallback: TCP/UDP 9295-9304
PSN sign-in ports .. TCP 80/443/3478/3479/3480 ; UDP 3478/3479
CGNAT .............. defeats forwarding -> use VPN or Cloud Streaming

# ---- OFFICIAL APP (Windows / macOS / Android / iOS) -------
Windows build ...... PS Remote Play 9.0.0.02120 (Win 10/11)
Android ............ app updated 2026-05-20 (Android 10+)
Sign-in ............ same PSN account as the console
Resolution / FPS ... 1080p / 60  (drop to 720p on weak links)

# ---- PLAYSTATION PORTAL -----------------------------------
System software .... 6.0.0+  (Cloud Streaming, 3D Audio, ~2,800 games)
                     + March 17 2026 update (1080p High Quality)
Remote Play ........ free, needs console awake, lower latency
Cloud Streaming .... requires PS Plus Premium, console can be off
1080p HQ ........... Quick Menu > Max Resolution > 1080p High Quality
                     -> restart session ; needs ~15 Mbps
PS button .......... opens Quick Menu sidebar (6.0.0 behavior)

# ---- CHIAKI-NG (Steam Deck / Linux / Switch / etc.) -------
Version ............ 1.10.0 (2026-04-03), NOT endorsed by Sony
Register ........... Settings > Consoles > Register
                     [PSN Login] (OAuth) or [Public Lookup]
                     + 8-digit Console PIN from Link Device
Resolution ......... 1080p / 60  (PS5) ; 720p / 60 (PS4)
Codec .............. H.265 (HEVC) ; HDR only on HDR clients
Bitrate ............ 30000 Kbps  (0 = auto)
Hardware decoder ... ON (auto)
# ============================================================

That is the entire feature, honestly configured, with none of the numbers inflated to sell you a subscription. Remote Play remains one of the quietly great things about owning a PlayStation: a free feature that turns any screen in your house into a console, and — with a real public IP or a VPN — any screen in the world. Sony will keep bolting on Cloud Streaming tiers and resolution modes, and the day a PS6 finally arrives the protocol will get another revision and this guide will need a footnote. Until then: wire the console, respect the 15 Mbps number, keep the PIN alive for five minutes, and go play something. The Machine has spoken.