SlingPlayer Mobile Review

INTRODUCTION
    So you bought your digital super HD 60 inch plasma screen TV with digital cable, but you work 80 hours a week to pay for it so you never get to watch it. I have got the solution for you, as well as your companies productivity department’s worst nightmare. Introducing SlingPlayer mobile. That’s right, SlingPlayer mobile. As in, you can watch your television on your Pocket PC if you’ve got a SlingBox. This is the ultimate toy, and attracts a crowd wherever you bring it, trust me.

For those of you not familiar with the SlingBox by Sling Media, let me give you a brief introduction. You hook up this pretty looking box up to your coaxial cable line if you have regular cable, or the outputs from your cable box if you have digital cable. Then you hook the SlingBox up to your router, do a little configuration, and voila! It broadcasts your television over the internet so you can watch it anywhere you have an internet connection. One setback is that it is limited to one connection per SlingBox, which is obviously a piracy protection rather than a hardware limitation, but it is still pretty cool. Freshly released, SlingPlayer Mobile brings the SlingBox broadcast to any Windows Mobile Pocket PC (Smartphone client not yet available) with an internet connection.

WHAT’S HOT
    This is the first release of the mobile version, and has been anticipated by many in the Pocket PC community. I’ll tell you what is hot: it works. It is not perfect, but it does what it says.

SETUP
    First thing, you have to make sure you have Microsoft ActiveSync 4.1 installed. The installation guide calls for this, so make sure you perform an update or verify that you already have it installed. After you perform the update, installation is straightforward. Run the exe, let it install on your Pocket PC while it’s in the cradle, and you are set. Warning: the install does take a very long time, and requires a soft reset which it will do automatically for you. One note I would like to point out is that if you have vBar installed (a popular alternative program to the switcher bar) you might want to uninstall it prior to installing SlingPlayer as I encountered some problems with the system locking up which went away after removal of vBar.

PRODUCT FEATURES

When you start up SlingPlayer Mobile, this is what you get after a quick little splash screen. First off you are going to need to add your SlingBox so you can watch it. When you first start a window will come up and ask you if you want to update your SlingBox directory. Click ok to this. You still will need to setup your SlingBox so you need to click Player -> Slingbox Directory -> Add SlingBox.

Adding a SlingBox is very easy. All you have to do is get your Slingbox Finder ID from the SlingBox setup screen (do this on your regular computer) and then enter your password, hit ok, and you are ready to go. I love it when things are simple and go smoothly. Lets get down to business here.

To start watching, click Player -> (your SlingBox) -> Watch. Give it a few seconds to connect and…wow! It’s your television!

    My first reaction to the picture quality was disgust… However, if you wait a few seconds for the stream to buffer and optimize, it will clear up as much as your internet connection allows for. After this, I was impressed with the video quality. The audio is fine and sounds as good as anything coming out of the puny speakers on my Axim. The fact remains that I am watching my television over my Axim which is just plain incredible.

    Time to change the channel! To bring up the task bar, simply click on the screen where you see it in the picture above and it will pop up. What do we have here to play with? First we see the player menu which has a number of options which we will discuss later. Next to that we have the stop button. This simply stops video playback and will bring you back to the main screen with the black box. Then we have the remote control popup button, followed by mute, a volume control slider, toggle control mode (more on this later), and toggle full screen.

    The remote control is a little strange, and takes up a silly amount of the screen compared to the size of the tiny buttons, which are hard to push in my opinion because of their size. The manual channel changer is too small as well. Good thing we have that gray text “SlingRemote” on the side, or else we wouldn’t know what to do. Changing the channel is very straightforward: to go up or down one consecutive channel, hit the down or up channel button on the left. To go to a particular channel, enter the number and either wait a second or hit enter. After a short delay you will hear an audible “pop” sound and the channel will change. Hopefully the next version will contain a much better remote control, although believe it or not, this is a large improvement over the previous beta version I tested several days ago.

    If you are having trouble getting a good picture over your connection (especially those on EDGE or GPRS), there is hope! Seen in the screenshot above (to access click Player -> Player Modes) are two extra modes that will help. Audio only mode is fairly self explanatory and although you should be able to receive this fine on low bandwidth networks, I don’t find this acceptable unless you actually want to only listen to the broadcast. A much better option is Slide Show mode. This player mode drops the frame rate down to about 1 fps and keeps the audio intact. Over my WiFi connection, the picture quality was terrific. It is fairly easy to keep track of what is going on, but the frame rates still make for some choppy video.

    Editor-in-Chief Brandon Miniman got a chance to test out SlingPlayer Mobile on his Cingular 8125 with an EDGE connection and confirmed that the video is choppy for the first few minutes, and becomes adequate (but still not smooth) after several minutes, probably as a result of the streaming optimization that the software is using.

    Also on the main menu, there is an option to select your desired input from the SlingBox. This is great if you have multiple sources such as a Coaxial connection as well as your satellite dish. I only have extra basic cable, so I was not able to experiment with this.

    Time to check out the options! Going to player -> Player Options will bring you to the screen above. Let me warn you: this is PAINFULLY slow. The video feed really destroys your system resources. The first tab which comes up is “Player.” Under buffer settings you can change between automatic and manual. Although I left it on automatic, some player issues can be resolved by changing the buffer and optimization settings. Mine works fine, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

    The next tab is “Encoding.” If you want to yank as much quality as you can from your SlingBox, you can disable the SlingStream optimization settings and adjust the settings to your liking. In my opinion, SlingStream optimization does a great job of keeping things moving while giving you the best possible quality. Once again these are mainly options you want to change if you are having any sort of problem with your video feed.

    Then we come to the “Audio” tab. To tell you the truth I can’t change the sole option in this tab, but maybe you can! Possibly this may have something to do with my coaxial input or else it may just not be supported in this beta release.

    Finally, we have the advanced options tab. The first two options do not seem to do anything I can figure out. No statistics are shown on the screen whether that option is checked off or not. However, the “Reconnect…” option is nice if you want your video to come up automatically when you start the player. This avoids the black background that comes up after the original splash screen.

HELP SUPPORT
   The program itself is fairly straightforward, however there is a great deal of support offered from Sling Media as well as the included SlingPlayer Mobile installation guide.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
    You need to be running either Windows 2000 or XP on your desktop computer, and have Active Synch 4.1 installed. Make sure you check this as even my fairly new Dell Axim x51v didn’t ship with Active Synch 4.1. Also make sure you upgrade to the latest firmware for your SlingBox and install the latest version of SlingPlayer on your computer. The upgrade is available on Sling Media’s home page. Finally, your Pocket PC needs to be running Windows Mobile 5.0 or Pocket PC 2003.

BUGS AND WISHES
    This is a beta version, so it is not perfect. My first install caused a critical error, but this seems to have been fixed in the latest beta. One thing that bothers me is that when I pull up the controls menu it will frequently be partially blacked out and not let you use all the buttons. This is easy to get around, and usually just requires you to close the menu by tapping the video portion of the the screen, and tapping the bottom again to bring up the controls. Even with nothing running in the background, the menus within the program take forever to pop up, and occasionally will freeze up and not show, or show up partially. You also want to avoid inserting or removing your Pocket PC from the cradle while SlingPlayer is running as it tends to freeze up. Stability is definitely an issue with this beta release, and hopefully will be taken care of in subsequent releases. Currently, there is no Smartphone version available, but one will be issued within the next month of this review.

PURCHASING
    According to the company: “SlingPlayer Mobile will be offered as a free download to all customers starting on March 23rd and the product will feature a 30+ day trial. If you are a registered Slingbox owner or if you purchase a Slingbox between March 23rd and April 26th and register it, you will receive a registration key for the final version of SlingPlayer Mobile. After April 26th SlingPlayer Mobile will be available for purchase for a one-time charge of $29.99 and of course, that does not include the cost of a Slingbox, which is a required component in order for SlingPlayer Mobile to work on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone.” The beta can be downloaded here.

PROS

• You can watch live TV on your Pocket PC…very cool!
• Simple, easy to use
• Slideshow mode is great when your bandwidth is limited
• Picture quality varies but can be very nice
• Audio is flawless (never skipped on me)

CONS

• Even over WiFi, video can become choppy and pixilated
• A big resource hog, don’t even bother running another program concurrently
• Menus can take an inordinate amount of time to open
• No Smartphone client (yet)

Source: Pocketnow