Jun 052012
Sling Media has just announce the ability for WD TV media players by Western Digital to work with the Slingbox Pro HD and Solo Models.
On your WD TV Media player you can now access the SlingPlayer app, change channels, navigate the program guide or watch and schedule recordings on your DVR – all from your HD TV.
Here is what you need to start streaming to your TV.
- An HDTV connected to a WD TV Live or Western Digital WD TV Live Hub
- Slingbox SOLO (SB260-100) or Slingbox PRO-HD SB300-100 with the latest firmware.
- Wired or wireless connection to the Internet
- Bandwidth Requirements
- HD: 2 Mbps or higher
- SD: 600 Kbps or higher
Setting it up and accessing you Slingbox is fast and easy.
Hook up your WD TV® media player then go to the Live TV tab.
Find and select the SlingPlayer icon.
Login to your Sling account, select your Slingbox, and start watching your television programming.
If you have a WD TV media player and a Slingbox Solo or Pro HD we would love to hear how the Slingplayer app streams for you. Hit us up with a comment!
Join the SlingPlayer for Connected Devices forum discussion on this post. There are already 30 comments on it.
Just updated the firmware on my WDTV and connected to my SlingBox PRO-HD, this works very well, picture quality is very good (local LAN connection), it feels like it takes a bit longer for the commands to be sent to the SlingBox vs. what I’m used to with the SlingCatcher. All is well except one drawback: the value of my SlingCatcher on the used market just took a nozedive!
Also, as the post says, it doesn’t work on my older SlingBox PRO…
Sounds like you might want to sell your SlingCatcher now.
Thanks for the feedback. I might have to go get me a new WD Live Hub now.
I have a Slingbox PRO HD. Have tried the Boxee box, logotech revue and now just purchased the WDTV Live. I WANT to say it works the best of all 3 because its the simplest, has a cool feature that can test your bandwidth on both ends, remote easier to use, BUT it loses a connection every 5 minutes or so and you need to re-connect. Is anyone else having this problem? or know of a fix? I feel like there are some bugs to worked out with this device but has such great potential. Also, like the other 2 connected devices that have slingplayer apps you will lose your connection when you try to pull up the program guide in the middle of streaming. Man, they are so close to making my dream of having a philadelphia tv in portland it makes me more frustrated. grrr.
Fake Eddy- i also feel it takes a bit longer too to send commands on WDTV! (at least compared to the boxee box)
IF the 5 minute connection loss issue is fixed i would rank them 1. WDTV Live 2. Boxee Box 3.Logotech Revue. but as of this minute i gotta give the nod to boxee box
5 minutes are up! time to reconnect…
As I’ve been having network problems with my Catcher, and I just happened to have a WD TV hooked up for streaming media locally, I updated the firmware and tried it out with the new Slingbox app.
It works just like the webplayer, so unlike the Catcher, you do not need port forwarding for it to work, so big bonus there! I agree with the others, commands do take quite a bit more time to go through than the Catcher though, so FF and REW are a bit of a pain with WDTV if you are watching a PVR. Also the onscreen remote commands aren’t as quick to get to or easy to use as the Catcher remote.
I would have to say it does seem to provide a better picture quality than the Catcher though, and with a seemingly more constant speed, therefore less skipping.
Tony: I have never had to reconnect my WDTV, is it possible you are running it at too high a quality setting? Other than that I don’t have any other suggestions as I haven’t experienced that problem, and I’m half way around the world from my Slingbox.
Overall, initially at least, I wouldn’t get rid of the Catcher yet, I think for it’s ease of use and remote control command speeds (I watch mainly PVR so I need FF and REW a lot!) it still wins over WDTV. Nice to have options though!
I did the network speed test and it recommended “better” for quality. (great picture quality by the way. not quite HD but still solid) 5 minutes in- sure enough though the slingbox disconnects and i have to re-stream. I tried your advice Popesterb and downgraded the quality to “good” but same thing happened. tried “basic” same thing 4.5 minutes in. I feel like i’m taking crazy pills!
Tony, are you using the WiFi connection on the WDTV? I have no disconnection issue on wired.
I have the same issue with wd live (disconnects after a few minutes) even when wired Ethernet is used.
I tried the hard wired approach. No luck. It disconnects from the slingbox 4-5 minutes in, sometimes earlier. I am however slightly glad it is happening to someone else and i can stop taking crazy pills
it is still very frustrating. i was also thinking it was maybe an issue with the slingbox back in phily but i am on sling website and streaming for over an hour at 1800kbps and it looks great. now if i could only get this stupid thing to work. big thumbs down to wdtv live if they can’t fix. thinking about returning this clunker for the boxee box but don’t really want to pay the extra $80 for the boxee. hmm, anyone hear any rumors of other connected devices in the pipeline to have slingplayer? i have tried all 3 from the sling website (boxee box, wdlive tv and logitech revue)
I would strongly recommend checking your Slingbox’s capacitors, even if you are streaming without any problem on Sling website. Please check how your Slingbox works with Flash SlingPlayer: http://slingplayer.slingbox.com/embedded/slingplayer.php
I have had this issue before of disconnect and connect even using my Slingcatcher. I thought it was my Sling that is causing this and just recently found out that it was actually my router doing this. After replacing my router, everything works perfectly on my catcher.
I also have a revue and running Slingplayer once in a while. What I notice is that the quality is way better than my sling (I think this is because it uses UDP rather than TCP). But the problem comes when you change channel and video freezes while you can still hear the audio and changed to other channel. In my opinion, those sling players on connected devices haven’t perfected the remote as opposed to stand alone players.
This is a great step for those who don’t have the Catcher and to those looking for a more affordable player that can project your remote sling to a TV (as we all know that catcher has been discontinued and prices is ridiculously high if you want to buy from ebay, amazon). Also, the catcher is definitely dead for a lot of reasons (doesn’t support UDP, waste of HDMI port on your TV, quality is not really that good compared to connected device).
What I will be interested is to have a sling player on connected device that can actually replace the sling player that we used to have (like those on PC/Mac, sling catcher). Thanks.
On the 5min diconnect issue – I would check your router’s DHCP logs and see if lease renewal times tie up with the disconnects. Some WAN connections have a DHCP lease of only a few minutes and if there is an issue with your firewall filtering certain DHCP messages then some connections will drop/break even if the IP does not change.
This was/is a common issue with a lot of routers (including DD-WRT). Its only noticeable on TCP connections which are actively transferring data during the momentary DHCP renewal – so ssh/telnet sessions might continue unaffected but ftp downloads or TCP slingplayer sessions would be affected (either stall or break).
I’m not exactly sure how to check my routers DHCP log but i think you are correct! it’s an older router and the connection is called: tcpWAN (I see from my slingbox info screen)
would you have any recommendations on an affordable router i should buy to get rid of the 5min disconnect issue?
Thanks for the help!!!
I like the NETGEAR WNR3500L router as an inexpensive one that as a lot of options. You can even add aftermarket firmware to it if you need some fancy settings.
If you want one that is extremely fast with a bunch of options then the Netgear WNDR4000 is probably one of the best.
I have to admit though I am kinda a netgear fan and do moderate on one of their websites for open source routers.
I am thinking of selling my slingplayer for $300 on ebay, and buying a WD live player for $89.
I originally bought my slingcatcher for $100 from best buy, so I am happy to take the profit.
I do not mind the delay, but how would you compare the quality between the two.
i bought the netgear n600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router. hooked it up. for one it is streaming at a lower kbps than my older linksys wireless-G broadband router model#WRT54G2 V1 ,much lower. its not good. i’m not too worried about that as its most likely something going wrong where the slingbox is i think…BUT then after 5 minutes it still disconnects! is there a setting somewhere that i am missing? in the firewall filtering? how do i check the DHCP log? anything else i can try?
back to the crazy pills..
You could try disabling the TCP port forwarding on your router for port 5001, and leave the UDP forwarding. This should allow the Slingbox to fall back on UDP mode when it fails to connect using TCP. In theory anyway – Ive never tried this.
BTW My refurb WDTV Live arrived today – works pretty good. I bought it because it was small and cheap and I might be able to use the Slingplayer in a hotel room on vacation using the AV connection. I didnt realize that it doesnt have a built-in browser so there would be no way of directly connecting to the hotel’s wireless network which usually requires a web browser to connect. Luckily I have a portable access point (TrendNet TEW-654TR) that can also act as a wireless bridge but I was hoping it would just work.
i called WDTV finally and after escalating to the top tech support people they told me WDTV Live is so new to Slingplayer that they haven’t worked out all the kinks and don’t have a solution at this time saying I should just return the product. at least they are honest! i have to give them that and will for sure check back at a later point but looks like i’m going with the boxee box as this thing is not ready for big time. Thanks for all the help though!
People,
I’m getting very good performance with Slingcatcher although would like to know if I can get even better image with Boxee or WD TV.
I have a PRO HD in lisbon with a upload link of 4MB. I’m connecting through Component out and HD Fury 3 to convert HDMI to component from my cable box to slingbox pro hd
In Madrid I have 50Mb download and using a slingcatcher to watch it. Very good image and solid with 4MB constantly
2 questions:
- With the Hd fury 3 I don’t get a full HD (colours more darker), is this normal?
-Can I get a better image with any of the connected devices regarding the slingcatcher?
Thanks
I have a Slingbox Pro HD which I recently hooked up to WD TV Live. In general I think the combination is great. However, I the WD TV is not recognizing my DVR (not highlighted on the WD control screen). I use my DVR as a tuner, rather than the built in Slingbox tuner. I can change channels and navigate the program guide using WD TV, however I can’t figure out how to access any of the other menus of my DVR. As a result, I can’t program my DVR remotely or choose the videos I want to play. On the web based Slingplayer this is simple using the on-screen remote control. Can anyone help me?
You could try running the remote setup again on the web based player just to make sure you have to correct one selected. They do change them occasionally. If no help maybe try a remote close to the same name as what you are using now for your DVR.
I went to a local WD retailer in Taiwan, but I couldn’t find SlingPlayer under LiveTV for WD TV Live. After some phone inquiries, WD Hong Kong support people told me the SlingPlayer for WD Media Player is only available in US.
…and available in Europe or at least on the U.K version.
Just received my wdtv live box yesterday and used a VPN uk server to change it to u.k content and run it with a unotelly dns.
Actually the slingplayer on the wdtv live works fine with my setup. I’m actually shocked, because the Logitech Revue google tv version is a mess. The sound coming out of the slingplayer app on the wdtv can get distorted too easily. Don’t have that problem with the slingcatcher and don’t believe I ever had any sound issues with the Revue…..but that was when it was working. As has been said, the delay time is pretty bad, but the wd live tv interface lags overall, so it’s par for the course. The stream is stable though and the picture is good, at least as good as the slingcatcher if not a little bit better. The interface is exactly like on the Revue, so I was up and running in no time. Hopefully the bugs that everyone’s dealing with will get ironed out, but at least I’ve got my slingplayer back on the bedroom tv for remote viewing because who knows If sling will ever get the googletv version working again with the solo. Don’t think pro hd owners are having the same frame rate problem on their slingbox, only Solo owners.
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……..um, about to eat humble pie here. What started out positively, and after quality testing, turned out to be a WDTV Live device that freezes and disconnects frequently after all. Considering my praise, and how something that worked so well in the first 24 hours could go south, so fast, makes me wonder what happened. It was placed in a cool location with a fan running on it. I never changed any of the settings and it was connected through the ethernet cable, but for some reason, it just got worse the longer I used it. Went back to the slingcatcher and P.C, just to check it wasn’t my two slingbox‘s that had the problem, but they were fine.
So, the conclusion from my tinkering is that the WDLive TV slingplayer live app is no better than Google TV for slingbox streaming, so I shipped it back because it also had trouble with a lot my MKV files and couldn’t play FLV files whatsoever.
I bean waiting for something like that for a long time, but now the wait its over, when to best buy buy one easy to use, thx
Just wondering what the state of play is with Slingplayer for WD Media Players?
I read that there were issues – were these ever addressed? Are Sling on the ball with improving the Slingplayer for Connected Devices?
Was considering experimenting with a WD Live player as a potential long term SlingCatcher replacement – should I bother?
Tried it with 18 down on my end and 4 up on the Slingbox end. No end of lagging and freezing.
Upgraded to 10 up. A lot smoother, but every one to five minutes, it will freeze up for about five seconds. Better, but still frustrating, and it doesn’t happen on the PC Slingplayer. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there has been any support from the Slingmedia end–they made the player, and haven’t fixed the issues in over half a year.