SlingCatcher box reveals codec support: why hello, XviD
By Nilay Patel 
posted October 23rd 2007 5:19PM
posted October 23rd 2007 5:19PM
posted October 23rd 2007 5:19PM
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xvid is like totally crap; h.264 FTW.
Why is Billy's comment low ranked, people? He is completely correct; h.264 (and its friendly open source counterpart, x.264) is superior to XviD in every way at equivalent bitrates. With growing h.264 support, either higher quality/resolution video can be had at the same filesize as XviD, or the same quality can be had at significantly lower sizes.
This is why both next-gen DVD formats use a derivation of the h.264 codec for their compression (yes, Blu-ray and HDDVD are both compressed).
My guess is that people voted this down because XviD is a widespread format & they had not heard of h.264. XviD's ubiquity in no way make it the "best" codec.
@Josh -
Support for all is best. There are wingnuts out there encoding in all sorts of formats. I even saw a Real video file the other day. I almost did a spit take when I saw it.
I for one welcome our new H.264 overlords
Hello! =)
I'm saying hellp to xvid
@Josh Warne: x264 is an encoder. h264 and XviD are codecs. At least get your facts right before you criticize others.
'matter of fact, xvid has a lot going for it still. Despite the fact that h264 codecs [such as the apple one, or x264] will undoubtedly deliver higher quality at lower bitrates, they take like 2-5 times the time to encode =[, and require a much faster system to play back on. that's really not a problem, but you cant play them at all on that 400mhz in the cupboard.
But there is a lot of content on a lot of harddrives in the format so it is pretty darn usefull to support it...
I'm all over this product when it releases. (Hopefully before I head out of town for several months.) This thing will smoke my original Slingbox.
WTF?! Slingsync? I guess I'm out of the loop, but that feature is fantastic!
Please release this thing before December!
where is dixv though?
Isn't divx just XviD spelled differently?
Why would anyone continue to use DivX? I can almost understand people still having some XviDs, but DivX is just too crap and old.
I want this. Badly.
I'm gonna kick Santa in the nuts if he doesn't deliver.
What's the price?
your soul
It was originally announced at under $200. We'll see soon.
No MKV, though. Always one step behind! I need to see the interface before I think about ditching my appletv.
Is there anywhere to get XviD (or DivX) content that doesn't require me to be a thief? Serious quesiton.
lol... good question. Actually, check out stage6.divx.com. Like YouTube on steroids.
@theCardinal: divx is still being updated. at the moment it's superior to xvid in encoding quality per bitrate, however slight it may be.
@everyone: there are several boxes with these capabilities (and more) on the market right now. dvico's tvix, tomacro's limHD, and most importantly syabas' brand new networked media tank, with sigma's latest SMP8635 chipset.
these boxes all support divx, xvid, h264, mpeg2, in avi, mp4, mkv and ogm. the high end boxes from the first two are capable of 1080p output via hdmi, but have a bit of trouble decoding some 1080p h264 content. the networked media tank will supposedly outdo them all when it becomes available on october 30th, by easily decoding 1080p h264 content, and supporting embedded text subtitle formats.
basically, the slingbox has some cool streaming features but if what you want is full support of any type of media, you should be looking at one of the boxes i mentioned.
the networked media tank will be available for purchase via www.popcornhour.com .
wow, I want one...like...now
Now we have to see if this thing will pass-through surround sound/DTS...
Does no one like .avi?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVI
The key to the SlingCatcher is being able to receive a SlingBox stream without a computer.. The media features are a bonus..
All along sling said this device would play ANYTHING on your computer screen on your TV. Now it is limited to what it can play. This is bad news
I spoke to soon it looks like it will still do that.
They called that SlingProjector early on. It was supposed to be like connecting a TV out from the computer. I don't see where it still does that. What do you see?? I'm hoping it's just delayed.
Look at the pics on the read link it is on the back of the box
I don't see anything that mentions the computer desktop or other apps on the TV, just media files.
A lot of focus in getting video from PC or Internet on to TV. What I really want is a very simple way to get TV recordings on to my PC. Simple as in simple enough my 10 year old can do it or ... even simpler so my wife can do it.
Any simple devices for doing this on the horizon? No, I don't want a media center PC.
It's called Tivo..
if you want to record TV on your PC check out BeyondTV at Snapstream.com - I've been using it to record all my shows and it now converts them to iPod and feeds to iTunes.
i believe the slingbox does exactly that. it came before the slingcatcher.
All of Sling Media's products will let you view TV content on your PC. This is the first product (from them) that will do the opposite.
Its funny now that Josh's comment it higher ranked then Billy's comment.
Overall the box looks pretty sweet.
I am yet to see a media streamer as good as XBMC in terms of codec support. I guess I'm still waiting.
you morons don't get it-
the main point of this thing is to stream your slingbox in one room where your high def cable box is, to another room in your house, so that you don't have to pay the man another 10 bucks a month for a cable box or tivo. as someone very astutely pointed out, the codec support is just an added bonus. yes we all know your hacked up crapbox supports 80 zillion codecs...thats not the point of this device.
feel free to read my comment above for several far superior alternatives to xbmc. xbmc supports h264, but xbox is not powerful enough to decode even most 720p streams cleanly, so forget about any 1080 streams. no hdmi either.
@andresalazar
you don't have to be so offensive about asserting your opinions. anyway, not everybody is looking for that functionality, and since engadget wrote about the codec support almost exclusively in the article, i felt like it would be relevant to let people know about alternatives for getting that functionality.
also, if you sling your cable signal to a slingcatcher in another room, aren't you limited to watching the same channel as the one on the main screen? please note this is just a question, i'm not assuming that that is the case at all.
Nobody wants to deal with Xvid or Divx because they're the standard for pirated movies and shows. to do so would probably create some kind of epic shitstorm with the MP/RIAA.
"Sadly, it looks like output maxes out at 1080i,..."
How many people have 1080p sets, and of those that do, have one large enough they can actually see the difference between 1080i and 1080p?
That last time I checked, the bulk of HDTV sets sold were still 720p panels (i.e., 1366 x 768 LCDs).
By the time 1080p output becomes useful to a significant portion of the population, I expect Sling will have released a new version (if this first version is successful).
Where the hell is this thing already?