how to watch your slingbox on a linux-based system

if you’re anything like me, you were quite annoyed that after you spent $300 on a slingbox pro-hd you found you couldn’t watch the stream on anything but a windows PC or mac, or ios/android/windows phone device (perhaps there’s also a blackberry app, but honestly, nobody cares about blackberry). finally, that limitation appears to be gone.

interestingly enough, i haven’t found a good write-up on how to do this anywhere on the web – so i decided to write my own.

i stumbled upon this while trying to get the website that runs the sling player for my google tv box to load on my PC (running ubuntu 11.10). i tried everything i could think of in chrome to try to trick the page into thinking i was actually a logitech revue, with no success. a bit later that day, i found this…and it works.

the key lies in sling media’s new “embedded slingplayer.” this is a flash based player that can be inserted onto any web page, and played in any flash capable browser (at least we assume so, we’ve only tested it in both chrome and firefox in ubuntu 11.10 – it works in both).

to test the theory, those of you who are running linux can head on over to nerdalerts’ slingplayer for linux. this page should open the embedded slingplayer, and allow you to log in and select your slingbox and have full control over it.

of course, there are restrictions – not having access to the guide the PC version gives you is one that comes to mind. still, this will enable you to do most things you’d want to do with your slingbox. you can change channels, change inputs, perform any of your home remote functions, go full screen, etc.

if you want to do this yourself, just save a HTML file on your computer with the following code in it…

<iframe src="http://slingplayer.slingbox.com/embedded/slingplayer.php" frameborder="0" width="768" height="800"></iframe>

now, whenever you want to watch your slingbox, just open that file in your web browser and you should be good to go. or, you can use our sling player. the choice is yours. considering where we’ve come from, it’s nice to finally have a choice when it comes to watching the slingbox on a linux system!

source: embedded slingplayer