How I Got My SlingPlayer to Run on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04

Traveling a lot lately, I've had to take some measures to get some American TV. So I set up a SlingBox with my TiVo HD Series 3 back home. I would have tried to set up a MythTV box with the streaming plugin, but I simply had no time. And as well, MythTV doesn't work with the cable cards (as far as I know). Anyhow, I got SlingBox/TiVo working beautifaully, but the SlingPlayer client has only a Windows and Mac version. I am almost always on Ubuntu. So I followed this guide:

 

http://www.slingcommunity.com/article/17253/How-To-Run-SlingPlayer-on-Linux-OS/

 

You can pretty much follow this guide, but there were a few things I did differently, because I had a few hiccups on my machine. My machine specs:

 

Dell Precision M65 Core2 Duo
Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 (32-bit)
NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M (video)
SigmaTel STAC9200 (audio)

 

What is needed:

Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 (http://www.ubuntu.com/)
Wine 0.9.46
Slingplayer (US Version) 1.5.0.332 (http://www.slingmedia.com/)
Various Windows Components (provided by http://www.dll-files.com/ hosted on http://www.slingcommunity.com)

 

Steps:

1) Install Wine

 

You can use the Synaptic Package Manager for this, per the guide referenced above.

 

2) Configure Wine

 

To get it to install on my machine without erroring out, I had to do a "winecfg" in the terminal and make sure that the virtual desktop was turned on:

 

 

You might as well check everything. Size the virtual desktop to a good size for your screen, else you will get cut-off.

 

 

3) Install SlingPLayer

 

I didn't have to install Windows Media PLayer as instructed to do so from the guide above. I simply ran the installer in wine (In the terminal type Wine [path to file] ) and it actually installed everything for me.  Great!

 

 

4) Download/Install the SlingPlayer Dependencies package from SlingCommunity.com.

 

This you can follow the guide referenced above, almost exactly. I say almost because I had trouble making the "Add" button UN-grey-out here:

 

 

 

It's because even though you choose from the dropdown, you must type something in that field to UN-grey it out. Anyhow, it should end up looking like the above. Make sure you have registered the DLL's per the guide.

 

 

5) Run SlingPlayer

 

Run slingplayer located in /home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Sling Media/SlingPlayer/ and run wine with SlingPlayer.exe eg. : wine SlingPlayer.exe

In SlingPlayer, make sure VMR is checked!! Then connect to your slingbox.

 

ENJOY!

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