Sneak Peak at the Sling Player for Mac OSX

kjh1 writes to tell us the folks over at SlingCommunity are running an interview with Brian Jaquet of Sling Media. They get the scoop on the upcoming SlingPlayer for Mac OSX. There is a text transcript as well as a video version of the interview."

Comments

"peek".

[hatless]

A sneak mountaintop?

Re:"peek".

[chazwurth]

Yes, that's correct. Widdling: the practice of taking something big and making it widdle.

Direct link to YouTube article

[From A Far Away Land]

The link in the summary loads a page with horrible popover advertising that floats in the way.
Here's the on the page.

Dear god.

[jb.hl.com]

OK, this article is as clear as mud.

1) What is Sling?
2) What is SlingPlayer?
3) What is special about SlingPlayer?

Someone tell me, please.

Re:Dear god.

[brunascle]

i assume a singplayer is slingware that connects to a slingbox

sling!

Re:Dear god.

[Andy_R]

Well, I visited their site, and it doesn't say what the damn thing actually is (or if it does, it's in a non-obviousl place), and after 2 minutes 30 of the video, all I know is that the developer doesn't know that the Dock is called the Dock. However, the interviewer does say "awsome" at least once in every sentence, so it must be good!

Re:Dear god.

[Cantus]

I think this should be informative: Slingbox.

BTW, I didn't know what it was either.

Re:Dear god.

[slughead]

1) What is Sling?

A piece of leather that allows one to hurl stones at high speeds.

2) What is SlingPlayer?

It's a brand new product which is now available on the Mac!

3) What is special about SlingPlayer?

It's NEW!

"What's Sling Player?"

[Peganthyrus]

The Slingbox family of products enable you to watch and control your TV anywhere you are from virtually any Internet-connected laptop, PDA, or Windows cell phone.

  - from Sling Media's site, for people like me who just kinda avoid TV, since both summary and article seem to assume you know what it is.

What it is

[mac1235]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox Ideal for people who don't have bittorent or have TV's. Poor bastards.

Re: What's a Sling Player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, so this article is another product advertisment!

Bet you feel special having paid for that little * next to your name, eh jackass?

VideoLAN

[digitalhermit]

Interesting.. Sling Player apparently allows you to watch television from any device.

Under Linux I use a program called VideoLAN Client to send television (or DVD, AVIs, camera) to other TCP enabled Linux machines. For example, I can use VLC to watch live television on my porch or in my garage over the wireless network. Quality is decent, though don't expect fullscreen DV over a 54Mbit wireless connection. Over the 100Mbit LAN and with a decent server it's pretty decent quality. MythTV also has this functionality.

You can also encode video for iPods if you want to shift your viewing to a a 2" display... I don't understand the appeal of it, but hell, the optometrists need the work.

Re:VideoLAN

[ivan256]

That's plain not true. It captures at the full 320x240 NTSC resolution. It scales the bitrate up to the available bandwdith. Quality video encoding DSPs are not very expensive at all right now. The difference between your PC capture card and the slingbox are that the slingbox has a slow, cheap general purpose CPU (which doesn't need to be fast), a cheap-o case, and no disks, etc...

On a LAN, the slingbox video is quite passable. Better than, for example, a TiVo on maximum compression.

Re:VideoLAN

[entrylevel]

NTSC is many things, but calling 320x240 "full resolution" is wrong. NTSC has several resolutions, all of which are considerably higher than 320x240.

The slingbox is awesome for $100, but VLC (and one of my favorites, the deprecated VLS) really has a leg up on the options it gives you. One of my favorite features is that it can transcode either a video file or input stream (from a capture card for example) into any other format it supports for playback, in realtime (as long as your CPU can handle it). I use it to stream 5 Mbit/sec video over wireless every day and it works and looks fantastic.

In my experience, VLC's lowest-end quality (for example, trying to send upstream on a crippled US cable modem or ADSL), looks far better than the highest quality available from a Slingbox. Other pluses are that VLC runs the same (and supports the same features and codecs) on all major operating systems and your stream will never be wrapped in DRM.

Re:VideoLAN

[tlhIngan]

I can't believe people have missed one of the major features of the Slingbox... it has an IR blaster.

It's a small feature, but very useful. I hook my Slingbox to my TiVo. Voila, I can watch my TiVo anywhere! (With full control of it too). It also supports cableboxes, so you can use it with digital cable. Or if you're really down, you can use the coax input for analog cable.

So via coax, it's like your VLC setup. But then add in the remote control feature, and the ability to remotely choose between coax, composite and s-video inputs dynamically, and Slingbox makes it a snap to setup. It can be all done via VLC and a few other OSS apps, but honestly, Slingbox took only 10 minutes to set up. Add 5 more minutes to change it static IP and open a port on my router so I can view it over the Internet.

Hook up a small surveillance camera, TiVo and maybe regular cable (or antenna) to it, and you can choose between seeing your camera, watching TiVo, or plain old regular cable/OTA, all controllable via the GUI or keyboard. It's place-shifting for the lazy.

sad that there's a need for this....

[nblender]

What I mean is that if the networks had their collective poop in a group, you would be able to access your monthly TV subscription via some 'iTunes' thing no matter where you were but as it is, you have to buy this extra piece of hardware and potentially violate the AUP of your broadband provider (for setting up a server on your connection).

I have some simple scripts that make it easy for me to automatically grab shows from my mythbackend at home, while I'm in my hotel room 12 hops away. I just watch them manually with vlc, laptop plugged into the hotel room's TV, and cellphone as a bluetooth remote... I keep thinking it would be fairly trivial to convince mythtv to do all this seamlessly...

In Layman's terms...

[cyclocommuter]

...A Slingbox is is a device that allows me to stream video from my Set Top Box (STB), DVD player, cable connection, etc., so I can watch it on any PC, Handheld device, Mobile Phone (certain models), and now Mac computer (running the SlingPlayer software) on the LAN or over the internet. So I can be on some business trip in Asia but still be able to watch local shows from my STB in North America via the internet. This is what is known as place shifting. It is actually pretty cool...

Article is spam

[Anonymous Coward]

ATTENTION SLASHDOT EDITORS:

Please stop posting press releases as "news". This is a e p.r. stunt and you're diluting what little credibility shashdot has by putting what is essentially an ad on the front page

Interview Venue

[ari_j]

What the hell? This looks like a teenager taking the interview in a busy airport concourse. Can someone help me pull the fork out of my ear? I had to put it there to survive long enough to find the "stop" button on the interview video.

The guy on the MacBook obviously doesn't use Macs.

[mattyohe]

"You'll see that there is an icon when you install it... in the uhh.. kinda cool little toolbar here" (while pointing to the Dock)

This is big deal for sling (mac) people

[mergy]

The buzz around this really is rooted in the way that Slingmedia has handled all of this. I was following this for a quite a while because I really liked the functionality of the SlingBox but was not happy on the lack of OS X support. Then, when Sony's Location Free TV came out and IODATA announced OS X software to work with it, I thought I was going to go down that route.

This is really more a kind of thing where Slingmedia showed an early beta of the OS X player (I think at MacWorld in Jan 06!) and the word got around, but Slingmedia was vague about exactly what was going to happen. Then, they did the typical "will release in Q3' garbage only to let that slip. They people went nuts.

So, long story short I was at Best Try this weekend and there was a SlingBox A/V there and the box had OS X icons (and Vista BTW - pretty funny) on the boxes. So, clearly Slingmedia's grand scheme was to already have the OS X release out by the time they release the new hardware models. Anyway, I bought one and got it working under Parallels on my Intel Mac Mini. Pretty amazing that the video and audio are synced-up while running in Windows 2000 in a Parallels environment VM. It works great. I tried initially to get it going on WINE and then CrossOver, but no dice.

Sling makes a good product, they just really dropped the ball on this. If they release the OS X player this month, all will probably be forgiven.

Re:Better Idea

[eldepeche]

-1, Can't spell.

Er no, not at all

[lakeland]

Apart from connecting to a TV signal this has almost nothing in common with EyeTV.

It is basically for people without many computer skills. They've got a computer (probably running Windows, maybe OSX) but they don't use it much. They've probably got broadband and they like watching TV. Usually they watch TV on their TV. Sometimes they want to watch it on their computer, sometimes they want to watch it on their laptop, sometimes on their mobile, sometimes overseas or at a friend's house.

Compare that to EyeTV. EyeTV is for people with a decent modern (OSX) computer that want to watch TV on their Mac with its nice screen. How can an EyeTV user watch what is currently playing at home while overseas? What about if they're in bed with their laptop, can you use your EyeTV plugged into your desktop to help? Even if you can with a few hacks here and there, won't that require your desktop to be turned on?

Re:Er no, not at all

[Andy_R]

Well, obviously you plug the EyeTV into your laptop to watch it with your laptop, so unless this non-techy person has friends with broadband but no TV, the only advantage of this device is it will work in realtime from an overseas location that has broadband access, or if you have a broadband-equipped phone with a big enough screen to watch TV comfortably and a price-plan that makes moving this much data to a phone affordable (if such a thing exists).

I still don't get why people would swap those tiny advantages for the price hike, reduced quality and inability to record. This looks like far too little, far too late to me. If usability is the supposed advantage, I'd happily bet that Apple's iTV (whatever it may turn out to actually be) will turn out to have the edge there.

Re:Dear god Indeed!

[Cadallin]

Would you whiny bitches quit posting "I don't understand!" "What's this about?" "I don't get it?" Do you do the same thing thing with the Nightly News? Do you hear "Volcano erupts in Hawii" and immmediately ask: "Whats a Volcano?" "What's this Ha-waa-eee thing?" "Isn't an eruption something that happens in sex?"

Sure, Sure mod me flame bait. But I'm fucking right here. If these people took any effort at all, or the same effort as making a post(!) they'd know.

Googling Slingplayer, the top fucking link is:

http://us.slingmedia.com/page/slingplayer.html

Which is the fucking product page! Searching Wikipedia for Slingplayer doesn't return it immediately, but gives this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search =slingplayer a list with the top(!) link being the Slingbox, the device this software interfaces with. It tooke me much longer to write this post than it did for me to do those searches, and that's the truth. It's not like this information is secret and hidden. A simple search on the most common information sources gives it straight out.

It's not just an advertisement...

[csoto]

It's a Slashvertisement! There is a difference. Ask for it by name!