Sling Media SlingCatcher review

Sling Media has been at the forefront of the internet television revolution ever since it launched the Slingbox, a device designed to let you watch and control your TV and DVR remotely. It has been steadily expanding its offering since then, with the Slingbox Pro, the Solo and various other accessories.

The SlingCatcher is the latest addition to the range, adding the ability to play back Slingbox-generated content directly on a television or monitor. Until this launch, Slingbox fans had only been able to playback via software on computers and mobiles.

It's a simple-looking piece of hardware; its trapezoidal lines echo the rest of the Sling range and it is operated entirely by remote control. The only button found on the device is a reset on the rear panel. Alongside this you'll find a pair of USB inputs, plus HDMI, composite and component video outputs as well as a 10/100 Ethernet port. As with other Sling devices, the SlingCatcher is for wired networking only.

Setup is simple: if you have a Slingbox on your network it will be detected automatically and then it's simply a matter of hooking the SlingCatcher up to your TV and entering its password via the remote. We tested it with a Slingbox Pro and found pictures to be of acceptable quality - on a par with most set top TV boxes - while HD content from an upscaling DVD player looked great.

The SlingCatcher also doubles up as a media playback device via those USB ports at the rear. It works in conjunction with the bundled SlingSync software, which scans your hard drive for movie clips, flagging those that are incompatible so you can convert and transfer them to a USB device. The playback quality is great, especially with HD files, but it's odd that the capability to play shared media directly from network locations hasn't been included.

The final trick up the SlingCatcher's sleeve is its ability to capture streaming video from any connected PC. The bundled Sling Projector software allows you to select and highlight any video window - with the result sent via the SlingCatcher to your TV. This, for instance, lets you to watch BBC iPlayer content directly on your TV without having to download it first. Beware, though, you'll need fair dollop of power to do this. Our test laptop, with a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, struggled to maintain a smooth frame rate while streaming iPlayer content.

In all, the SlingCatcher is a capable device, but the lack of file streaming ability means its general appeal will be limited. Even for those who already have a Slingbox at home we're still not convinced, though - why add one of these to your setup, when a decent standalone DVR with a hard disk on board, will cost you the same or less?

Author: Jonathan Bray