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.'"

Re:TV-out anyone?

[myspys]

reply to my own post, bad, but..

why not use TV-out and http://www.shoptronics.com/2wiauvisesyw.html [shoptronics.com] 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

How is this better than....

[bobintetley]

How is this better than the Hauppage MVP [hauppauge.com]?

Not to blow my own trumpet, but I did a fair bit of work on the mvpmc [mvpmc.org] 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: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: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!).

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:why all the hoopla?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Advertising & Bling.

or, in non-mac-hating reality, interface and form factor.

the creative was as big and round as a portable CD player and frequently froze.

Re:HDMI

[VorlonFog]

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

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sling Sucks, I got one of their boxes for streaming TV and the video was coppy even on a 100mbps ethernet. Unless the TV signal that you want to encode is pristine it won't work. I would even go so far to say that Windows media center steams better between a PC and an extender, and I'm no huge fan of the quality of that setup either.

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:They missed the perfect device.

[superatrain]

Umm.... You can just tunnel through ssh to a mythtv backend and do that already. Don't see why you need a new device for that...

Re:TV-out anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't appear to do HD. At least, it doesn't mention it in the spec (all their uses are standard NTSC or lower resolutions). Although, to be fair, aside from announcing an HDMI output, the SlingCatcher reports don't explicitly specify that either.