oviano

Cheers!

Glad you got it sorted - those pesky kids eh!

Thanks Tom! The website is https://emustream.tv The Slinging concept has probably had its time as a mass market device with the increase in over the top streaming services but I think there is still a niche of users who want to replicate exactly what their set top box gives them. Or possibly just me

Hello Alan I'm no longer hacking at this project so I can't help with your issue - perhaps Sling changed something with the firmware, I don't know. I have actually spent some time in the past couple of years developing an alternative solution. It's not Slingbox-based and requires setting up your own hardware components (a PC to act as encoder, a capture device to capture the AV and an IR transmitter to control the STB) and although it is more complicated to initially setup, the end result is pleasing. With the right hardware it also supports HEVC which means you can get very good quality for around 35-40% less bandwidth. I've written players for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and tvOS. I don't know whether I am allowed to link to my project's website here, so I'd better not, but if you would like to know more then drop me a PM. The software I have written is free; it's something I've purely done for myself for fun/the challenge rather than something I am trying to monetise. Cheers Oliver

When I was tweaking this app a while back I couldn't find a way to change this buffer size, so I concluded that it was fixed by the Slingbox or otherwise not exposed to the active X API.

It seems sttange they'd be blocking specific outgoing ports unless it's an attempt to restrict things like BitTorrent or something - does email and web browsing work as normal? Have you tried simply rebooting your router/modem?

Where is it failing - when it loads your Slingbox directory (ie logging into your Sling account) or when connecting to a Slingbox?

It's definitely possible - you may need to edit a registry file to map buttons from the MCE remote to keys on the keyboard. It's a while since I did it, but I recall I used this website to help me: http://kodi.wiki/view/Using_a_Microsoft_remote_control_in_Windows The aim is to map buttons on the remote to keys on the keyboard, but of course matching what keys you have setup to perform the various actions inside SlingFront (which is configurable). Good luck!

Some people were reporting issues yesterday in their forums. Did you check there too?

I'm not seeing this - both account login and connecting and viewing a Slingbox are working for me. Unless it's firmware dependent and they haven't rolled out all firmware yet. It did take a while to load the Slingbox directory this morning but it got there in the end. What exactly are you seeing - failure to login to your account, failure to load the Slingbox directory or failure to connect to a Slingbox?

As a hack/workaround, could you maybe use something like Autohotkey or similar to constantly force SlingFront to the foreground I wonder? How do other apps deal with this - is it a bug in Kodi that makes it show itself or is it something about SlingFront not behaving well as a plugin?

I think my main reservation would be that this would presumably bypass Sling's adverts, as SlingFront does and I doubt that would go down too well with Sling. At the moment SlingFront probably falls below the radar a little. Well, I expect they know about it but the number of people using it is probably tiny compared to the number of people using the official free players. If it got to the stage where enough people were using it to cost them money then I doubt it would be allowed to continue - after all they don't offer an SDK and indeed have history of encrypting the stream to prevent this exact kind of development. Since they control the firmware on the Slingboxes I'm sure if push came to shove they could make it so that only the official players could connect to their boxes. At the moment I doubt that is in their interest - the work involved would probably cost them more money - but I'm sure it would become in their interest if they started losing money. So in summary, in my view it's theoretically a decent idea but I think maybe it's better to of let sleeping dogs lie, enjoy what SlingFront currently gives and keep it low key. I have mine rigged up to a Harmony remote and I find it's way better than all the official players for the various devices they have supported at one time or another,

The problem is that even if there was a setting to open it in a window the code that detects key presses and (possibly) mouse input would take over from any other running apps due to the way it has been written. Essentially it hasn't really been designed for anything other than full screen. It's possible but to be honest SlingFront is meant as a full screen/TV user interface - you'd be better off with the official desktop or browser players if you need it to run in a window but at a guess you're fed up with the ads?

Nice try, Tom! Did you run into the same difficulties as I where you could get it building but it just wouldn't connect? Anyway, the app is still working very well for me. Hopefully there is nothing Sling can do at the Slingbox end to prevent it working in future!

http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/13680-siingfront-not-working-with-latest-activex-plugin/

Well I've not tried this so it's only theoretical but I would turn on logging on your router, if it has the option, and see what attempts the Slingbox makes to communicate with the outside World. I would expect some kind of regular 'ping' to inform the Sling servers of it's IP address so you'd probably want to block all communication to and from your Slingbox other than this one and other than whatever port your Slingbox is configured to use for the actual stream (most likely 5001, 5201 or 5301 depending on your Slingbox model). Personally I haven't done this because I'm reasonably confident it's not going to be necessary. I think they have designed the Slingboxes as fairly generic streaming devices that anything that knows the login credentials and login mechanism can connect to, as shown by the script that the folks have come up with on the forum I mentioned above. If they were going to fundamentally change this then they'd have a pretty complex upgrade procedure for the various apps, plugins etc to try and avoid breaking something. I.e. They couldn't just update the firmware to use this new method without simultaneously updating everything else. Are they really going to go to this trouble? Bear in mind that SlingFront I believe connects to boxes that are several years old now, such as the Solo, and so they can't have changed the whole connection process for a very long time. Oliver

1. I don't think so, no. It still uses an older plugin so as it stands it's irrelevant what Slingbox do with the plugin as long as the old one carries on working. Will it carry on working? Well it would presumably need some kind of firmware update on the Slingbox to prevent it and to date they've not done this. I'm not even sure if the Slingbox knows whether it's a plugin that is connecting to it, let alone what platform or version. Over on the "Placeshifting enthusiasts" site there is a whole thread devoted to some scripts that folk have written to directly grab the stream off a Slingbox to record it, bypassing any plugins, apps, etc. This suggests to me that the Slingbox has no "knowledge" of what is connecting to it. However, your guess is as good as mine as to whether SlingFront will continue working with Slingboxes forever but at the moment I see no reason why not. It even works with the latest box, the M1. I'm not aware of anyone currently working on SlingFront. I tried to update SlingFront to a newer plugin a few months back as I thought it prudent that it should work with the latest for similar reasons to yours but I hit a brick wall and needed help from the original author (Tom Speirs) but I guess he's been understandably too busy with other projects. Maybe there is another developer out there who is able to take a look? 2. I believe the desktop app is actually just a wrapper around a Chrome-compatible version of the plugin. So this would suggest that the plugin approach is here to stay, but whether they will eventually abandon the IE version of the plugin that SlingFront is based on is a valid question. As it stands probably the only guaranteed way to keep SlingFront working would be to configure your router to block firmware updates to your Slingbox just in case they release something that stops it working with SlingFront as per point 1 above. The only way things can then fail is if something relating to the login process changes which needs modifications in SlingFront. You may remember this happened once and I fixed the issue. As a precaution I've taken a copy of the 'login response' that contains my Slingbox password, ID etc, so that if push came to shove I could add the option to SlingFront to manually configure the boxes it connects to without contacting the Slingbox account server. I have no idea how many people are using SlingFront but I know it'd be very annoying for me if it stopped working, I use it literally every day. When hooked up via a suitable physical remote it's second to none when it comes to getting your Slingbox stream onto a TV. Way better than the official solutions. Like a SlingCatcher on speed basically.

By the way, there is another way to get proxy support working with the M1. If you go to the Sling viewing website and put in the proxy settings there you should find the desktop Slingplayer for the M1 picks up these settings. In fact you may even find that having entered them in SlingFront allows them to be picked up too. It seems they are stored centrally somewhere on your PC where both the website and the desktop player can pick them up. If you're intending to view on a TV then SlingFront plus a suitable remote control is a better option though anyway.

Yeah just go into the Windows control panel and uninstall the Slingplayer plugin. This should allow SlingFront to install the older version of the plugin that it requires. Of course if you then later try and view a Slingbox via the website it'll try and reinstall the newer plugin which will then stop SlingFront from working...

It doesn't reproduce for me, and I've not seen anyone post about this issue before. If I could reproduce it I'd take a look, but it's not actually my project (I just contributed some tweaks a while back) so you'll likely have to wait and see if anyone else sees this thread.

No it's not designed for touch - it's best when used with a physical remote control. You might be better off with the official Windows 8 Slingplayer which presumably is touch-friendly.

Ok, so essentially when a function is mapped to key code zero is behaves erratically. Does it make any difference if you edit these settings from inside SlingFront rather than directly in the ini file?

Haven't seen this - what is the name of the process that continues to run, is it the actual SlingFront app or the web plugin?

In case anybody is interested, a quick test showed it working fine.

I have read that the Sling viewing website blocks the M1, forcing the user to use the new desktop app instead. However, the desktop app itself is seemingly built around the web plugin so maybe SlingFront will still work...