Slingcatcher - The Swiss Army Knife Set-Top Box
Written: May 12 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good remote viewing option for Slingbox owners.
Cons: some shaky software, no HD streaming, no WiFi support
The Bottom Line: Good for streaming video to a standard definition TV, either within your local ethernet network or from a remote location.
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| teamw23's Full Review: Lenovo SlingCatcher (51J0855) |
I own a little cabin up in the mountains we use as a weekend place. I am willing to pay for a DSL line up there, but getting a satellite TV subscription really makes no sense. However, I would like to watch TV occasionally when I am up there. Before the Slingcatcher, I could get access to TV through my laptop and the Slingbox. It works, but if you want to sit on the couch and watch a little TV up there on a rainy day, the laptop is not exactly ideal. In a perfect world, you'd have some way to throw that video from a remote location right up onto a regular TV screen and control it with a real remote control just like a regular TV. There was no clean, simple way to do this before the Slingcatcher.
So the Slingcatcher fits the unique needs of niche users like me - people who have a second house somewhere where there is high-speed internet but no cable TV, or ex-patriots living overseas who have no other access to domestic TV and would like to get their Slingbox feed off the computer and onto the living room television.
That small audience is probably not enough to support any consumer product, and so the Slingbox people packaged this feature with a kind of Swiss Army knife of other features, hoping that one or more of them might induce you to buy it. So I will review all of these features separately.
Remote Viewing
As for remote viewing, your mileage will vary widely, because the quality of the picture is mainly determined by the upload speed from the Slingbox and the download speed at the receiving end. Whatever the lower number is - that's how fast it will go.
Nevertheless, I can report what kind of picture you can expect with a 3Mps connection, which is a fast DSL line on the receiving end and a very fast sending connection (Verizon FIOS with a 10Mps upload speed). A connection this fast allows you to turn up the resolution from the standard, 320x240 to 640x480.
This higher resolution seems like it would be unnecessary when connected to an SD TV, but it isn't. There is a noticeable difference in picture quality by selecting the higher resolution. In the 320x240 mode, the picture is sort of VHS tape fuzzy. It's something you could still watch, but it is really not that great, while the higher resolution provides a picture quality almost indistinguishable from a local SD TV signal. Not perfect, but mighty close. So if you have network speeds like mine, great, otherwise you are going to be living in VHS land.
The sound is a different story. Even at the higher bandwidths, it is still fairly compressed and so the quality is just ok. Pumped through the TV speakers it gets by, but don't expect a rich home theater experience despite the rather optimistic option to get 5.1 Dolby Digital sound out of the Slingcatcher.
The remote control is pretty well laid out, with a largely logical, intuitive design. I very much like the fact that as you push a button on the Slingcatcher remote, it shows that the button has been pushed right on the local screen - which makes sure you don't push the same button multiple times by accident while waiting for the remote Slingbox to respond. This feature exists because there is a bit of a delay in response as the Slingcatcher talks to the remote Slingbox. It's not really bad, but it does make aggressive channel surfing hard. You need to connect this to a DVR or a cable box with a program guide and use the guide to select what you want to watch, rather than aimlessly surfing around.
Extra Cable Box Replacement
At $5 a month you can rent a regular, basic cable box for a very long time before you would pay for this product. However, if you are renting a cable DVR at $15-20 a month or have a single TiVo you want to access from multiple locations, this might just turn out to be a cost-effective alternative. You hook the Slingcatcher up to your wired home network and connect it to a 2nd TV, while your Slingbox is connected to the main cable box. I tried this out just to see whether it would work before installing the Slingcatcher at my cabin. In my experience it worked pretty well. The picture looks good (SD quality) and the remote is far more responsive than when controlling a Slingbox remotely. The maximum Slingbox resolution is 640x480. That isn't going to cut it on a 60" HD TV, but for an SD TV, this works just fine.
Shifting PC Video to Your Television
If you like watching Hulu on your laptop, wouldn't it be better to watch it on your big HD TV? You can install software on the PC that will allow you send either a cropped segment of your PC screen (for video like Hulu, YouTube), or the entire screen to your TV for doing things like PowerPoint presentations. I tried this with Hulu in the 480p mode and threw the picture up on a 50" HDTV. Basically very good picture quality, similar to an upscaled DVD and the sound goes through to the TV very nicely as well. I also put it in full-screen mode and ran a PowerPoint. Looked fine. There is about a 1.5 second delay between the PC screen and the TV, which would be a little annoying if you were giving a presentation using this. The software is a little buggy and unstable. I did get it to work, but it does crash occasionally for me.
Accessing Digital Video Files on your TV
The idea here is that you can put video from your computer onto a drive and then connect it to the Slingbox and play it back through your TV. You use a USB drive for this. The first time I tried this, I couldn't get it to work at all. But I tried again with a different thumb drive and it worked ok. The picture quality was limited to 640x480 and so this was still not an option for HD files, but it rendered DIVX and VOB files pretty well. Again, the sound quality was fine.
Setup
Setting up a Slingcatcher is pretty easy. You just connect to the TV, Power, and Ethernet. There is an HDMI port to connect the Slingcatcher to an HDTV, even though the Slingcatcher doesn't support HD streaming.
There is no Wi-Fi option (the bandwidth requirements basically requires a wired connection). The Slingcatcher does a firmware update and then you have to tediously type in your Sling User ID one letter at a time using the remote control. But that's really all there is to it. The entire process takes maybe 15-20 mins. The remote control is a nice size and shape and they spent a fair bit of time on the layout, so it is pretty userfriendly. The keys map to the device you are controlling, and they worked flawlessly for me. You can also program the volume keys to control the local TV and there is even a key you can program to turn the local TV on and off as well.
Conclusions
For someone looking to move a Slingbox feed off the computer and onto an older, standard definition television, this is not a bad purchase. It doesn't support HD streaming and so it doesn't really work for pushing HD signals around the house or receiving them from some remote location.
For remote viewing, it really does a very nice job, assuming your bandwidth can support it. I figured that a regular old SD TV, optimized for viewing a low-resolution image, would probably display a nicer picture than my laptop, and I was right. I would much, much rather watch the remote feed from my Slingbox on this thing vs. on my laptop. It is also much nicer to be able to use a real remote control instead of the virtual one that comes with the Slingbox software for the PC.
If you care a lot about watching Hulu on a regular TV, the software is a little buggy, but it does work. If all you want to do is watch an mpeg file on your TV, there are better, cheaper ways to do this than buying a Slingcatcher, but it isn't a bad capability to have in addition to the other features.
Recommended:
Yes
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teamw23
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Reviews written: 47
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