Excellent start

[oviano]

This application gets a big thumbs up from me.

Had a little play around this morning and a few small suggestions:

- are you planning on being able to choose the video quality setting? I like that Auto is supported, but sometimes Sling's algorithm for choosing the setting isn't great in my experience

- I'd like to be able to disable it from auto connecting to the last Slingbox

- the UI could do with a improving - in particular the big blue boxes for the buttons could be drawn in a more pleasing manner, rounded corners, textures etc.

- sometimes when navigating the UI there are flashes of white appearing - for example when you choose Settings then General Settings, part of the screen temporarily has some white appearing which gives it a clumsy feel

- when streaming, the I key brings up the info box, but this also activates the Info button on my Sky box, bringing up a program info banner. Since this interrupts the stream (because it has send a command) this means the info box contains information that isn't so valuable.

- a minor one this, there is a typo in the keyboard control editor - it says 'NextSligBox' instead of 'NextSlingBox'

Overall though I think it looks great. I've been wanting something like this for ages - something to combine the performance of the web player (responsive remote commands etc) but designed for the TV.

I can already see it walks all over the WDTV player that I've been fighting with for months.

Good work, polish this up and I'd pay money for this - even more so if you make a Mac version (would be ideal for setting up with RemoteBuddy and a Harmony remote).

[oviano]

A couple more things to add after a further bit of tinkering.

- if the remote STB is on standby it seems that the app aborts trying to connect due to lack of a video signal. It needs instead to display a message and then the user can use the controls to turn on the power. I would suggest also adding the Power Toggle button to the mappable commands as it would be important for users where their STB is set to go into standby mode.

- the last couple of times I've connected to my remote UK Sky+ HD box, there has been some audio/video sync issues, just by half a second or so. I verified it was the app by trying with the web player in Chrome and it was fine. When I tried again using the app I got the sync issues again.

- I suggest adding the coloured buttons, red, green, blue and yellow as mappable buttons, as these can be quite important for some STBs, like the Sky box

Hope this helps.

[SlingPT]

Great work!

One question:

Are you connecting through HDMI? DO you get better image with WD or connecting your pc to the TV? that for me is crucial.

[oviano]

Yes HDMI.

I would say the picture quality is marginally better using this (which is essentially the web player plugin) compared with the WDTV.

There isn't much in it though - the WDTV hovers around the 2.3mbps mark for me at Best (HD) whereas the web player hits 3-4mbps but not hugely different. I'm not *entirely* convinced the WDTV players isn't under reporting the bitrate or something as I'd have expected a worse 1920 x 1080 stream at 2.3mbps. This is all from a 1080i25 Sky+ HD output by the way.

As far as SlingFront is concerned I haven't yet seen if it can run at Best (HD) because the Auto setting hasn't yet been kind enough to switch to it yet, but given that this app seems to be some kind of wrapper UI around the ActiveX Slingplayer plugin I would expect it should work.

My main reason for having high hopes for SlingFront and why I say it walks all over the WDTV player is not about video quality but just that I know the web player performs more reliably than the flash-based WDTV player and doesn't suffer the awful delay in issuing commands.

If a few small fixes/improvements can be made I'd hook a mini HTPC up with this app in a flash as a replacement, one of those Zotac ZBOX devices might do the trick.

[skeet]

Thanks Tom for the fix!!

With the new version 1.2, It launches seamlessly into the slingfront client and back to XBMC !!! This is a useful app. I don't know how you did it but i wish i knew how to port over your code to advance launcher. Whenever I use advance launcher to launch any app, after I close the app, it doesn't properly maximize XBMC back.

[Tom Speirs]

Thanks for the feedback guys I will have a new version out shortly addressing some of your points.

Skeet, the issue occurs when XBMC is running full screen not in a window. It should be easy to fix up Advance Launcher, I have looked at the code. The trick is to actually launch XBMC.exe (event though its running) which is the only thing that seems to set the focus back.

[Tempest]

That is a slick trick Tom!