Archive:Slingbox

Starting with Eden, XBMC can function as a Slingbox client.

In order to add a slingbox, add a source in the following format: sling://username:password@slingboxaddress:port/input

Where username is either administrator or viewer and slingboxaddress is either an IP address or DNS name that you can resolve locally and input is the input number you want to watch. Input is optional, if none is specified it will default to the first input. Port is also optional, it will default to 5001 (default Slingbox port) if none is specified.

If you want to change the default connection settings for connecting to your Slingbox, you can create a SlingboxSettings.xml file in the userdata folder (where the AdvancedSettings.xml file would normally be created also, for example) with the following layout:

<slingboxsettings>
 <slingbox>
   <width>320</width>
   <height>240</height>
   <videobitrate>704</videobitrate>
   <framerate>30</framerate>
   <smoothing>50</smoothing>
   <audiobitrate>64</audiobitrate>
   <iframeinterval>10</iframeinterval>
   <buttons>
     <channelup>09</channelup>
     <channeldown>0A</channeldown>
     <zero>3A</zero>
     <one>31</one>
     <eight>38</eight>
     <nine>39</nine>
   </buttons>
 </slingbox>
</slingboxsettings>

Every settings is optional, so if you only want to override the audio bitrate, then that's all you have to specify, all the other settings will keep their default values. If you need your Slingbox to send IR commands to control whatever your source is, you need to enter your button details in the button section. Currently only the channel up/down and 0-9 buttons are supported. They need a value somewhere between 00 and FF in hexadecimal notation. The problem currently is that the only two ways to find the correct values are either by trial and error (most Slingboxes I tested had values under 50 for all these buttons, if that helps), or to analize the network traffic between the Slingbox and Sling Player ... not a very user friendly act.

you are connecting to more than one Slingbox, you can specify settings for them seperately, by adding hostname=slingboxaddress to the slingbox entry in SlingboxSettings.xml ... so it would look something like this:

<slingboxsettings>
 <slingbox hostname=slingbox1address>
   ...
 </slingbox>
 <slingbox hostname=slingbox2address>
   ...
 </slingbox>
</slingboxsettings>