Monday, December 26, 2011

Catching my Sling

As someone living away from my "home" country I've become quite used to using Sling Media's Slingbox devices to stream Sky TV from our flat in the UK over here to Istanbul via the Internet.

The Slingbox viewing page
For those unaware, a Slingbox is a device that you plug into your home network and also connects to your satellite or cable TV box. This clever little box can then stream video and sound around your network or across the Internet where it can be viewed on another device, such as a PC, that knows how to decode the stream. To complete the picture, the remote device can also send commands over the network that the Slingbox receives and converts to IR codes using a pair of IR transmitters which are placed close to the IR sensor on the Satellite box. This means that the remote viewer can have full control over the satellite/cable box, change channel, access the EPG, etc. This is what has become known in the industry as "place shifting" and the Slingbox has become one of my favourite gadgets of all time.

Now originally with the Slingbox it was only possible to view your TV stream using either the PC or Mac Slingplayer desktop software, but Sling gradually expanded the player application to mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows phone etc and have also established a web page where you can view your TV from your computer's browser via a proprietary plugin.

A few years ago they also created a device known as the Slingcatcher which, in my opinion, gave the best and most seamless viewing experience, largely because it did away with the need to fiddle about controlling your PC with the mouse when all you wanted to do was change channel. It managed this by providing a hardware remote which essentially gave you the true 'place shifting' experience of watching your remote satellite box and having a remote control in your hand that would allow you to control it. For me this has been ideal as I can put on some UK TV very easily for my young daughter for example, without having to open up the laptop.

Lately though, Sling Media seems to have taken a slightly different direction. For a start, they ditched the Slingcatcher, although for whatever reason they never announced this and have instead allowed their customers to discover this gradually for themselves by quietly removing references to it from their site. You can still find Slingcatchers from places like eBay but they now command a premium price. To "replace" the Slingcatcher they're currently integrating their player into various other hardware devices, the first of which has been the Boxee and Google TV.

The ill-fated Slingcatcher
They have also seemingly given up development on the Windows and Mac Slingplayer desktop software - neither have seen updates for ages - instead appearing to see the web plugin as the primary viewing method for your computer and the one they update regularly with fixes and enhancements.

The early signs from these most recent of ventures though are that while they are creating player applications for a large number of devices/platforms - they even have one for the ubiquitous Facebook platform - they perhaps aren't really interested in creating the most seamless and intuitive place shifting experience.

Now to be fair, I'm probably not their main target audience. I suspect for Sling Media it's more about watching your TV on-the-go, rather than catering for people like me who want to fully reproduce the native experience in a different location and I can understand that.

So anyway, to cut a very long story slightly shorter the purpose of my first few blogs is going to be to outline a mechanism by which its possible to set up a functional replacement for the Slingcatcher on a Mac Mini in as an elegant a fashion as possible so that when and if my Slingcatcher packs up, there is a viable alternative.

There is also the fact that the Slingcatcher has a maximum output resolution of 1280 x 540 which is somewhat less than the 1920 x 544 that the Slingbox Pro-HD is capable of streaming and I'd like to be able to get the best possible stream on my TV now that I finally able to get a fast Fibre-based upload speed from my UK flat.

The first blog will describe how to create a small application using AppleScript which can be used to automatically launch Safari, navigate to the watch.slingbox.com web page, connect to a Slingbox of our choosing (if there is more than one) and switch into full screen mode.

The second blog will detail how to ensure that the on-screen "virtual" remote control used by the web plugin has keyboard shortcuts set for all the buttons on the remote that we want to control. If your remote already has all the shortcut keys you require then you can skip this step.

The third blog will show how you can use the popular Remote Buddy software to configure an Apple Remote control to trigger the keyboard shortcuts and thus give you control over the remote satellite/cable box.

The fourth and final blog will show how you can take it a step further and integrate a Harmony universal remote into the system and use it to provide a fully fledged remote control for the remote satellite/cable box.

Finally, a special thanks to fellow Slinger Yoav Freiberger for helping test some of this stuff out!

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