Jaksta Recorder for Slingbox Slingplayer Review

Almost from the day the Slingbox came out people have been looking for an easy way to record their Slingbox video streams to their computer.

Sling Media also looked into this themselves and even teased us with their announcement of Clip + Sling back in 2007.

We were told that the  “Clip+Sling is a feature that will be built into both the desktop and mobile versions of SlingPlayer™ software, giving Slingbox owners the ability to record and share portions of content in just a few short clicks. While customers will need a Slingbox to publish clips, the content posted to an interactive portal will be accessible by anyone.”

and they were even testing it. ” Clip+Sling is currently in private beta, with the company accepting applications for inclusion in the beta as it is broadened within the United States.”

We were even shown a demo of how it worked.

Unfortunately, as we posted Whatever Happened to SlingPlayer Clip + Sling?, it never came to fruition.

Other companies or individuals also came up with other ways to record from your Slingbox. As reviewed here by ZatzNotFunny’s Dave Zatz Applian’s Replay SlingCorder program “records to hard disk whatever your SlingPlayer is broadcasting”

There was also the SLR Slingbox recorder and other recording programs created by individuals that could record the Slingplayer broadcast in various ways and abilities.

But that too didn’t last. The reason is because Sling Media made a software revision that encrypted the Sling content. Any software that could not decrypt the Sling Player output was pretty much made obsolete.

After Sling Media starting encrypting their Video Stream most folks just gave up on trying to record from the Slingbox.  Fortunately Applian  did not give up on it entirely.

They started a joint venture, about a year ago, with a company called Jaksta. They asked if  Jaksta  could look into an updated SlingBox / Player recorder.  Although  it might be considered a niche product,  Jaksta took on the challenge and created an updated program to help SlingBox owners record to their computers.

They updated the software and about 6 weeks ago they put the new Sling Recorder out for beta testing. On 05-24-2011 they announced that their New Recorder for Slingbox is available.

Jaksta even put together a special for current At-Large Recorder owners. They  can pick up the new update for a special price of just $9.95 (regular price is $49.95). If you have never been a At-Large recorder owner or want to gi ve the new Jaksta Recorder a try you can do so for free here at Jaksta-recorder-for-slingbox/

But with the stream encryption issue you may be wondering how they got it to work.  In a nutshell they created the recorder program to use a lower resolution that doesn’t use any encryption.

It’s a great work around but it limits the recording to a maximum of 320×240 resolution.

This may or may not be a deal breaker for you.  Depending on what you will be recording, 320×240 resolution may be fine for your needs.  News broadcasts and sitcoms for example may not need to be recorded in higher resolutions were sports, racing or other high action content would benefit from a higher resolution.

Jaksta has also included a conversion process that runs automatically to convert your recordings to all popular mobile device formats like  Mac/Quicktime, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, PSP, PS3, or Android. It will also convert your recordings t0 MP3, MOV, MPEG-4, AVI and others. If you are recording video for a mobile device the recording resolution may not be an issue at all.

If you use iTunes the Jaksta Slingbox recorder will also import your recordings into iTunes automatically.

You can also schedule future recordings ,but of course, to do so you would have to leave your computer on to record the Slingbox when you have it scheduled to do so.

In our testing, we have found it works as advertised with our newer, current,  and older Slingboxes. Right now they only have a  Windows 7, Vista or XP program. There is no Mac recorder as of yet.

Since they offer a free demo of their Slingbox recorder, if you are interested, I would suggest you give it a try. Their free demo only records one minute but that is long enough for you to see if it works for you.

Here are a couple of videos recorded by Jaksta.

The first is the raw ASF file recording.

This video is the same recording as above but automatically converted to MP4 by Jaksta.

As you can see, watching the video above, the converted MP4 video looks pretty good in the smaller window.

One thing we have found in testing is that the default recording setting works best.  You can change the recording settings, if needed, but unless you have the time or the back-end knowledge of how the streaming and encryption process works,  you could quickly find out your videos don’t record properly or may have to do several tweaks to get everything just right.

Also keep in mind. If you have any issue connecting to your Slingbox using the Jaksta Slingbox Recorder it may be caused from you not having the TCP port correctly forwarded to your Slingbox.
I would recommend you use the Slingplayer Standalone program for PC and setup internet viewing and get a success notice before trying the Slingbox recorder. You need to do this even if you only want to record from your Slingbox on your local area network (LAN).

All-in-all we were pleasantly surprised on how easy it was to run and that it worked as advertised without any issues for us.

I would recommend you download it and give their free demo a try. If you do so let us know what you think!

[Get Jaksta Recorder for SlingBox Here]