Slingcatcher

Sling Media's Slingcatcher has been touted as the device that would give users the opposite benefit of the company’s popular Slingbox products. Rather than “placeshift” a TV signal to be viewed remotely on a computer, the Slingcatcher would allow a TV to display content from a computer.

If you have a lot of cool video content on your computer that you're dying to display on a big screen TV, Slingcatcher sounds like a pretty neat idea. I recently got a chance to put the device to the test.

Project From Your PC to Your TV
The first step is to connect a PC or Mac to a home network while plugging in an Ethernet cable to the back of the Slingcatcher. After downloading the free SlingProjector software from the company website, the PC can then forge a connection with the Slingcatcher.

Though it's able to project to the full screen of the PC, it slows down considerably when video clips are involved. In my experience, it's better to just press F5 on the keyboard and select the window on the screen showing the clip.

This works well because the software is smart enough to recognize the different windows on the screen. So, regardless of whether you’re using YouTube, Windows Media Player, iTunes or any of the Web browsers, you shouldn’t have a hard time pinpointing the part of the screen you want.

Presentations tend to benefit from this as well because you can select and deselect an area and have the changes reflected on-screen. There is about a five-second delay for anything you project, which usually doesn’t matter, but might be a bit of a pain if you’re doing simple things like browsing the Web or opening up folders and files.

You can also control video somewhat through the remote, but you can’t really browse with it. Mind you, this probably wouldn't be a major issue if your laptop is within arm’s length.

Image quality varies, of course. YouTube is always a toss up, but even projecting movies you’ve downloaded or ripped from your DVD collection offer varying results. You're probably better off playing those with the second option.

Connect a Hard Drive and Play your Media Files
There are two USB ports in the back of the unit, and they’re there for the simple reason of connecting external hard disk drives. I connected one of Western Digital’s My Passport hard drives and had the Slingcatcher read the contents. I couldn’t do anything but wait for it to finish. The problem was I didn’t know whether it would take five minutes or an hour because the manual didn’t mention anything about it.

This was a 250GB drive that was about half full. It took over 30 minutes to read all the media contents (it ignores all other non-media files that aren’t photos, audio or video). This was much longer than I would've liked, but thankfully, the Slingcatcher doesn’t need to go through that process each and every time you connect the drive. Once the first time is done, it only looks for new files that have been added thereafter.

When everything is finally up and running, you’ll likely find this method to be very user-friendly. The Slingcatcher software essentially shows the folders and files it read from your hard drive. Playing a video, song or photo album is as simple as clicking on it.

Generally speaking, the Slingcatcher is pretty good with playing different file formats, but I was frustrated to see that it didn’t like the movies I had in .mp4 with H.264 encoding. The Sling Media website lists the formats the product supports, but there are a few catches.

Between the bitrates, codecs, formats and compression, the whole thing can get very confusing. I found AVI and WMV files worked without any major issues, while MPEG-2 files, including high-definition ones (1280x720 resolution), also played well. But this is ultimately something that Sling will have to address at some point with future firmware upgrades. Having to re-encode video or wondering why one AVI file plays while another one doesn’t is annoying, to say the least.

Still, it’s nice to know that you can take your Slingcatcher and a small external hard drive (or even plug in a USB thumb drive) with you on your travels. Because there’s no PC or network connection needed, you can apply this setup just about anywhere.

Sling Over to Another TV
Assuming you have a DVR connected to your Slingbox, like a TiVo or some other set top box, it would be possible to stream the signal over to the Slingcatcher and another TV in another part of the house — or even another part of the world.

But in order for this to work, both sides will need a good broadband connection to start with. That's easy enough within a home network, but it has its share of hiccups when connecting remotely. Without a bitrate of at least 1,000-1,500 kbps, the image just looks too pixilated on a bigger TV screen.

But if the bitrate holds steady, the viewing experience can be very satisfying. Sling figures that students going off to dorms can get their TV fix on the parents’ dime. For the most part, they’re right about that. A student could just download everything and play it using an external hard drive, or simply make use of a DVR from home. Actually, both options are available.

What works so well with a device like the Slingcatcher is that it blurs the lines between online video and TV content. Tech-savvy Born Digitals and professionals can easily get the hang of this, but even novice users will eventually find their way, especially when the PC and home network are taken out of the equation. Being able to program the Slingcatcher remote as a universal one for several devices is an added benefit.

Some Headaches
But there are headaches, too. As of now, the Slingcatcher can’t stream anything in high-definition (HD). So, even if you did have access to a DVR back home, you would have to watch all that HD content in standard-def. There’s also no way to convert unsupported files through the device — though Sling says that an application to do just that will be coming down the pipe for Windows XP/Vista users.

Meanwhile, the SlingProjector software for the Mac hasn’t been launched yet, and there’s no real word on when that might happen. Linux users will probably find some homebrew method of getting it all to work, but there’s no official word on Ubuntu support, either.

So while the Slingcatcher offers a lot right now for projecting video content from your PC to your TV, there's still something be desired with this product. Overall though, it's a good first step.