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."

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?

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...

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: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.