Slingcatcher Reviewed

Welcome to The Satellite Dish, I hope you had a great holiday!  Normally, I do not do equipment reviews here in "The Satellite Dish",  however I recently got my hands on a "Slingcatcher" unit by Sling Media and I have been so impressed with this unit that I decided to share my review here.  If you are a gadget geek like me you might want to look at this product.

Since the arrival of the Slingbox on the scenes in July of 2005 people have had a hard time explaining what a Slingbox is.  A Slingbox is an amazing product which is usually better explained by showing what it does then explaining it. And once you show someone what a Slingbox can do they want one.  The same can be said about the new Slingcatcher from Sling Media.

The Slingcatcher is like a Swiss Army Knife for watching Video.  If you can watch it on your computer, you can watch it on any TV.

First and foremost you can enjoy any of your Slingboxes on any television no matter where you are.  This is great when your traveling and beats watching TV on your laptop.  The Slingcatcher comes with its own remote, which lets you control your video equipment at home.

In the pictures of the remote, it looked triangle in shape, however this is an illusion and s flat on the back and is quite easy to hold and operate.

For my testing I was able to enjoy my Dish Network HD DVR, my DirecTV DVR, my free to air satellite system, and cable television from the office. All just like I was sitting in front of them.

Setting up the Slingcatcher was simple,  I opened it up plugged it into my network, hooked it up to my TV and after booting up and accepting a software update I saw all 3 Slingboxes in my house.  I was quickly watching my Slingboxes and the quality was excellent.

In order to see my Slingboxes that were not in the house I needed to log into my Sling.COM account, doing this was kind of a chore, but only because I have a long email address.  To enter your email address and password to log in you use the number keys and type in the letters like on a telephone..  Once setup I was able to see all of the Slingbox units I own.  (And note that to do all of this I never needed to touch a computer or configure my router.)

In my house I have a Slingbox Pro HD unit,  A Slingbox Pro Unit, and a Slingbox Classic unit.  The picture quality on both pro boxes was very good, While the picture on the older Slingbox Classic looked a little like I was watching video on the internet.   Disappointing was the fact that I could not watch the HD from my Slingbox Pro HD as the Slingcatcher does not currently support HD streaming, but again the picture looked very good.

The Slingcatcher features standard AV video outputs, plus SVIDEO and Component outputs plus coax digital audio output as well.  Settings let you customize the Slingcatcher for the TV you are hooking it up to and you can even specify the resolution you want the Slingcatcher to output at including 1080i.

There is no real manual included with the box just a quick setup guide.  But setting it up and using it is a no brainer.  The menus are well laid out and explain things well.  You can even program the Slingcatcher remote to control the power and volume controls on your TV.

Besides letting you watch Slingboxes on your TV the Slingcatcher is also a good media player.  By hooking up an external hard drive or USB drive to one of the two USB ports on the Slingcatcher you can watch your media on the drives.  This worked very will but not surprisingly wouldn’t play some on my purchased iTunes songs due to Apples silly DRM.  (Note Sling is working on software called SlingSync which can be used to convert incompatible formats to make them playable on the Slingcatcher.)

Another neat thing that the Slingcatcher can do is by using the Slingcatcher with a PC and using a downloadable windows based software called the Slingprojector.  With this software anything you see on your PC can be shown on your television.  But the Slingprojector does not just mirror your entire screen onto your TV, you can pick the area of the screen you want projected on your TV.  In doing this the Slingprojector just takes that portion of your screen and blows it up on your television.  Now I know a lot of you are saying Blowing up a standard Youtube video on a big tv set must look bad, but surprisingly sling has some kind of magic technology in the Slingcatcher which blows up small video nicely on your tv without it looking like a bunch of big pixel blocks.

In testing this me and my kids watched videos on Youtube for hours.  It was fun watching these videos on tv, but would have been hard for us to all watch if we watched on a PC.

I found it neat that by using the play, pause, rewind buttons I was able to control stuff on my PC, it was like having a wireless mouse.  The Slingcatcher remote operated Windows Media Player without any issues.

The Slingprojector portion of the Slingcatcher is VERY powerful and I feel it is not being marketed correctly.  This application could get heavy use in the business world, in fact I took my Slingcatcher to work this week and hooked it up to my conference room projector as we were on a video conference getting training for a new phone system we will be installing.  With the Slingprojector we were able to take the video (and only the video) and put it on the big screen while I was able to use my laptop to check email and do other things below the video window.  My co workers also enjoyed taking the little video window and being able to see it full screen.  Personally  I think every conference room should have on of these units, they can be used in many ways for your business.

In another test I was able to pair a Slingcatcher with a Slinglink Turbo setup.  The Slinglink uses Homeplug technology to transmit you internet connection via the power lines in your house.

To test this I took a TV to my basement and hooked the Slinglink Turbo broadcaster upstairs in my bedroom.  I hooked the Slinglink box into my router then went down to the basement.  I hooked up the TV, Slingcatcher and Slinglink receiver  and within a few moments I was watching live television.

Testing things I was surprised to get speeds over 4345 Kbps via the powerlines in my house!  The Slinglink is a great way to expand your network in your house without running new cat 5 cable in your house and is great when WIFI is not practical.  My Slnglink Turbo box features a built in 4 port hub making it easy to expand my network almost anywhere in my house.

I got to be honest, I didn’t really want a Slingcatcher, but now that I have one I am using it a lot.  I now have a small TV at my office and am able to watch and control my satellite systems without needing to lose space on my computer monitor with the Sling software.  And being able to control my home equipment using a real remote.  The Slingplayer is a winner to me.

As I said in the beginning the Slingcatcher is hard to explain until you used one, and once you used one your not going to want to give it up.

Pros:
Easy to setup
Your forget your watching TV over the internet.
Slingprojector is a powerful tool.
Very Good Picture Quality

Cons:
Does not currently display true HD from a Slingbox Pro HD unit.
Can’t play files that have Digital Rights Management
High price causes sticker shock (but ultimately it’s worth it)
Slingprojector software is only available for Windows

For more details on the Slingcatcher visit http://www.slingmedia.com/go/slingcatcher  and for more details on the Slinglink Turbo check out http://www.slingmedia.com/homeplug