How well is SlingFront prepared for future?

[Alanjudy]

I got an email from sling about changes in chrome support to 64 bit only. That got me thinking about SlingFront.

1. Is SlingFront already 64 bit? If not is this being worked on?

2. It also appears that Sling's direction is shifting to standalone apps and away from browser plug ins. How will this affect Slingfront's continued use?

On a side note, I recently compared Chromecast to SlingFront and slingfront had superior resolution and less buffering problems.

[oviano]

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.

[Alanjudy]

Thanks for the detailed response. How would I go about configuring my router to block firmware updates but still enable Internet viewing?

I agree that SlingFront is hands down the best solution, having had a slingcatcher and just looked at the Roku and Chromecast solutions. Chromecast might be interesting for hotel rooms.

[oviano]

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

[Tom Speirs]

I just wanted to apologise that I have not been able to work on the project. I did make the project open source though if anyone else is interested.

I expect I will get back to this at some point. I do still have a slingbox its just not something I use.

[Tom Speirs]

Just an update for you.

I have spent a good amount of time trying to get SlingFront to work with the new ActiveX control and unfortunately had no luck with it and have given up on it for now.

Ive got a 500 working here and SlignFront still seems to work great with it.

[oviano]

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!

[Tom Speirs]

Yes, exactly, it would not show as connected and connecting/starting caused an exception. I messed around all through the night and came up with nothing.

I came to the conclusion the control will only work on the sling site.

I put a copy of the working activex installer on the SVN just in case although I am sure you thought about that already.