Sling Streams iTunes Content To TV

Vitamin_Boy writes "Sling has a new product out, the 'SlingCatcher.' It sends video from the PC to the TV and does it for $200. Oh, and it works with iTunes. Will this undercut Apple's iTV? The Ars Technica article thinks it might: 'The SlingCatcher... is media-agnostic. It doesn't care what codec videos are encoded with, nor whether or not they have been purchased from an approved online store. It is designed to take video output and stream it, which means that you could use the SlingCatcher with video purchased from other online services, such as the iTunes Store or CinemaNow. In this way, the SlingCatcher may turn out to be a one-size-fits-all solution in a field populated with specialty products.'"

Comments

Or you could.. you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a card with a TV-OUT? They're not exactly rare.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[complete loony]

Yes, but then you have to have your PC next to the TV in the lounge room. There are lots of things you wouldn't be able to do on your PC at the same time, unless you also buy a second sound card and have an OS capable enough to send the audio in the right direction. I'm guessing this product will also come with a remote and IR port, which again adds more costs to the PC solution.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[Optikschmoptik]

Actually, this looks like it might be the perfect solution to the problem that TV-out, S-video, et. al. were inadequately addressing.

I have a 2.5 year-old notebook that is pretty much my entire media center. If I want to watch something with decent resolution, I pretty much have to watch it on my notebook's 15.4" screen. Fine for me watching something on my own, but it's a little frustrating if I want to show a video at someone's house and they've got a brand new gigantic HDTV sitting next to my little LCD. If there happens to be an S-video cable sitting around (probably not), I still need to hunt down an 1/8" to stereo RCA to route the sound out, and the picture quality is still terrible. I looked into alternatives, but there's pretty much no reasonable way to get good video from my laptop onto a nicer screen--VGA to HDMI? VGA to component? I've been told I'd be pretty lucky to get it to work at all (maybe I fell for Dell kiosk fud, but that's part of the same frustration).

But 802.11g should be easy enough. Let this box worry about video processing and video compatibility. And sound. All my computer has to do is send data, and it's great at doing that. The device's concept seems so obvious, but apparently no one has bothered to try making it until now.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[iainl]

That's odd. The HDTVs I looked at, and certainly the one I eventually bought, have either VGA or DVI-I sockets, so you can hook up a PC straight to it.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[Kadin2048]

If that HDTV only has HDMI inputs, and no analog inputs (DVI-I or VGA), that's a pretty lame television set right there. Given the amount of source equipment that produces various flavors of analog video, the world isn't ready for sets that only have digital inputs.

I do wish that I could find the engineer who thought that Y-Pr-Pb was a fair alternative to some sort of actual RGB-based interconnect (like, I don't know, everything else in existence that uses high-quality analog video, e.g. SCART and 5-pin RGBHV), and throttle them.

There's really no good reason why consumer video should be this complicated. It's mostly a result of a lack of widely-accepted standards and mutual incompatibility that doing something as seemingly trivial as getting a computer to display on a HDTV (which is nothing but a computer monitor with delusions of grandeur) becomes so complicated. Unfortunately, because consumers have become accustomed to such things being a PITA, they don't go running to the manufacturers with pitchforks in hand, every time one of them produces shoddy gear, as they should.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[profplump]

There are good reasons to send YPrPb signal as an output from an MPEG source, such as DVD or OTA HD-TV -- it more closely matches the input MPEG stream format. This allows for less overall mangling becuase it allows the output device, which presumably knows its own color profile, to do the only colorspace conversions that might be necessary.

I just don't understand why it's the only option. As far as I can tell the only things you have to do to make your input accept RGB and YPrPb is add a menu option and about 25 lines of DSP setup code. Most (if not all) video output devices process to pixel data with matched luminance and hue resolution and do color separations, be that RGB or some higher number of colors. Accepting RGB as input for that conversion seems almost trivial.

Re:TV-out anyone?

[myspys]

reply to my own post, bad, but..

why not use TV-out and http://www.shoptronics.com/2wiauvisesyw.html if one wants to use tv-out but don't want a loooong cable (or put the pc next to the tv)?

$120 cheaper than Sling Streams

why all the hoopla?

[oohshiny]

By now, there are half a dozen products that stream video from the PC, from the Web, etc. to your TV. I don't see why people get so excited about either the Sling or iTV--they are nothing new.

Re:why all the hoopla?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I don't see why people get so excited about either the Sling or iTV--they are nothing new.

For the same reason people got excited about the iPod when there was already the creative mp3 player line (and many others).

Advertising & Bling. Surely someone with your nick would understand ;-)

Re:why all the hoopla?

[ozmanjusri]

By now, there are half a dozen products that stream video from the PC, from the Web, etc. to your TV.

Yep, I've been using a Kiss DP1500for the past year - it's a DVD player that'll stream video or audio from a shared folder over WiFi. It'll also play web radio and most audio/video formats out there.

It cost me A$240.00 about a year ago, and yes, it does run Linux...

Strange Title on that Slashvertisement

[patio11]

I recently bought a new computer monitor, and it is iTunes compatible!!!1

No, seriously, we get it -- its an output device. It can output whatever the heck you want to the TV, be it iTunes or World of Warcraft or your Open Office spreadsheet (which probably makes for better television than half of the lineup). If it couldn't output whatever the heck you wanted, THAT would be news to the Slashdot "Egads DRM is choking us to death!" faction. And they'd be mostly right to be upset about that.

Nice idea, but -

[Dark Paladin]

A) We've seen this before, so what's the change?
B) My understanding of the iTunes store sharing is that when you want to view a video/play a song you purchased, it checks to see if the client you're using is authorized. If Slingbox hasn't broken that DRM system, then how can it be used for iTunes purchased shows?

How is this better than....

[bobintetley]

How is this better than the Hauppage MVP?

Not to blow my own trumpet, but I did a fair bit of work on the mvpmc project to get VLC streaming integration working on this device.

The Hauppage MVP can be picked up for around 50 USD, it sits next to your TV and has an ethernet (or wireless if you want to pay a bit more) connection and a remote. It can integrate with slimserver for music playback, MythTV, can play MPEG1/2 video directly from shares (and any kind of video via VLC, which it does by requesting a vod transcoded MPEG2 stream and allowing you to control it transparently via the MVP remote), and is far more flexible than this - AND cheaper!

Re:How is this better than....

[bobintetley]

And if I read the article, I'd have noticed the big deal was DRMed crapola from iTunes.... that'll teach me.

Re:How is this better than....

[Ray Radlein]

The MediaMVP is a wonderful little device (we've got one in our bedroom), but mvpmc is not exactly a solution for everyone (I'm fairly technical, and I still haven't screwed up my courage enough to use any of the various replacement MVP solutions yet), and the native MVP software languished for almost a year before being updated a few times recently.

The big new thing here is the playing of iTunes videos: I still remember how pissed off I was when I discovered that there was no way of streaming the Battlestar Galactica episode I bought from iTunes down to the TV in the living room. I was not about to make my wife and her mother crowd around a computer monitor to watch it. Since, last I checked, VLC won't play iTunes protected videos, using it as a bridge to stream content wouldn't work (if there's a way around that, I'm all ears!).

Re:How is this better than....

[bobintetley]

If you just want a working mvpmc and don't plan on doing any development, you can just download a dongle file - it's a single binary file that you stick in your /tftpboot directory to serve to the MVP via tftp (it's actually a squashfs image).

All releases of mvpmc have one of these binary dongles and a nightly process builds upto date ones if you need new improvements (I and most of the other devs also put up new ones on our project pages if we're working on something we want folks to test, but don't want to commit to the main tree just yet).

Point is, if you just want mvpmc you don't need to compile it.

Admittedly, if you DO want to do some development, the cross compiling stuff (MVP is PPC) can be a bit painful, but the lead dev (Jon) has done a LOT of work in this area recently and now it really is as simple as doing a "cg-clone && make" (and waiting a few hours!).

Re:How is this better than....

[Ray Radlein]

Well, that'll teach you, then.

In fact, it did.

Go and pay iTunes for its stuff if it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, and then download it via bittorrent, so you have a clean copy that you can actually use.

There are some people who might allege that I did exactly that. I, of course, have no comment as to the veracity of such hypothetical allegations.

This? Nah.

[Erwos]

Apple's probably far more worried about the Xbox 360's movie and TV download service, which is apparently doing very, very well. That's not to say this is a bad product - I can think of uses for it - but at the same time, it also seems like a hassle in terms of interface, and interface is king to a lot of folks.

Undercut?

[Gord]

> Will this undercut Apple's iTV?

It's a bit difficult to tell since it's not even released yet, nor have many details been made public.

Will find out more at today's keynote I expect.

HDMI

[diesel66]

The Sling thing and Apple's iTV have HDMI out. The Hauppage thing appears to just have component out. If you want to drive the latest widescreen LCDs and Plasmas to their potential, HDMI is pretty helpful. That would be an important factor for me, anyway.

Re:HDMI

[VorlonFog]

"That Hauppauge thing" is the Media MVP, and it has S-Video out, and if you have a SCART version, RGB.

Meme Alert:

[Zaphod2016]

media-agnostic
adj.

Without devotion to specific codecs, nor specific (approved) stores. Designed as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Current Google Index: 13,900.

I like this phrase. I love this concept. Here's hoping we hear it a lot more often in the wake of the recent BlueRay/HDDVD debacle.

Perhaps it's a deist?

[porkchop_d_clown]

Media exists, but it doesn't care what happens to the SlingCatcher.

Upstream capacity of WAN connection is the killer.

[Kadin2048]

It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.

Well, that's not hard to figure out. If you want to watch DVDs via your internet connection, you better be able to put through around 5-6Mb/s, and that's assuming that you have some sort of transcoder that can filter out the unnecessary stuff and pass along only the video and audio stream that you want. The DVD spec allows bitrates up to 10.08Mb/s, if memory serves, including all subs and various audio streams, but a typical commercial one is much lower for the parts you'd actually need to transmit.

Now, if you have a computer on the transmitting/media-server end that's cable of transcoding the video into some more modern format than MPEG-2, then you can probably start talking about live streaming on a 1Mb pipe. You wouldn't get HDTV, but you could easily push passable 720x480 MPEG-4, at say 800Kb/s for the video and 128Kb/s audio, for a total of around 930Kb/s before adding in your protocol's overhead. So basically, a 1MB/s symmetric connection would probably work.

It's certainly possible with today's technology, unfortunately, most U.S. broadband connections aren't up to snuff. A lot of folks are on connections that only give them 128, 256, or 512 Kb/s upstream speeds (e.g. even Comcast's premium cable service only offers a paltry 384 kb/s upstream speed with 6Mb/s down, or 768kb/s up with 8Mb/s down). With buffering you could probably make some of those connections work, but I doubt it would be a hit with consumers -- you wouldn't get the same 'instant start' that you do with locally-stored videos (because of all the buffering).

For the next few years at least, media sharing of the kind you're talking about (where you keep all your content on one system, and dole it out to front-end systems for display), is going to be pretty much a LAN phenomenon.

Sometimes not that easy...

[Kadin2048]

True, but as I recently found out to my chagrin, quite a few big-name (Compaq, I'm looking at you) don't let you install additional video cards. I had an old Celeron system that I wanted to use as a frontend STB, so I picked up an old $20 PCI-based video card with an S-Video out. Unfortunately, I didn't think to check the BIOS: there's no way to disable the onboard video and use an aftermarket card. (With the card in, both outputs just give a black screen.) Apparently this is not uncommon in low-end systems. In my case, it meant that I just had to get a new Socket 370 motherboard that didn't suck so much, which these days is another $20 junk-bin part, but it turned a simple drop-in upgrade into essentially rebuilding a computer.

Sometimes the obvious solutions have unanticipated complications; there's a whole lot of consumer hardware out there that won't "play nice" with anything. For non-technical people, buying a new box may be simpler than upgrading anything they have.