kmcital tech notes

Tech stuff worth sharing

SlingPlayer running on AppleTV

I absolutely love my AppleTV, the kids love watching photos and home movies, video podcasts, etc – we love rarely having to go to Blockbuster to rent movies, and we also love having complete control over our family’s television viewing (we canceled our cable and save that money and avoid the junk out there, occasionally buying a show to watch…wished they would lower the cost down from 1.99, but oh well! we spend time as a family doing other things.)

With our cable cancelled, we have a slingbox for those must-see shows, foxnews, and recorded programs. We watch it on our iMac and even have connected my MacbookPro to our 50″ plasma TV for the important stuff.

I have been wishing we could watch our slingbox on our AppleTV and finally we can!! I have been following this thread and finally greg Rice posted easy to follow instructions how to do this: How_to_install_SlingPlayer_on_AppleTV. Thanks greg!!!

It works! I did not do the reset he suggested and did not need the recovery.dmg. Also I had to create the folders Applications and Documents in the frontrow user folder on the ATV. I was tripped up a little at first when I didn’t see the mouse and the keyboard didn’t work…until I realized you don’t see these until you launch SlingPlayer and focus is on the MultiFinder.

A tip: I was able to change window position to center it by changing the window position of slingplayer on my macbook, exporting preferences and importing those preferences on the slingplayer on ATV (after copying that exported file to the ATV of course). I tried having it startup in full screen but that caused occasional crashes.

One last note: sound does not come out through my optical out, but it did come through the HDMI connection to the TV.

JUST IN TIME FOR MARCH MADNESS – YESS!!!!

March 20, 2009 - Posted by | installation |

14 Comments »

  1. I also did this and also installed Snatch on the Apple TV to control Slingplayer from my iPhone.

    Comment by Aaron | July 21, 2009 | Reply

  2. I’m in the Philippines and will have a Slingbox back in the U.S. In order to watch Sling programming on my TV here, which device would be best to buy …

    Apple TV … or …
    Slingcatcher?

    Thank you!

    P.S. My computer here is a Mac.

    Comment by Teddy | January 1, 2010 | Reply

  3. @Teddy: if all you need is access to Slingbox then Slingcatcher is the way to go. AppleTV is what you want if you want both ATV content and Slingbox.

    Comment by kmcital | August 10, 2010 | Reply

  4. I’m guessing, you do not have a mouse set up on Apple TV, right? I don’t have a mouse and was wondering if I can get around without one.

    BTW, if you are into news then Livestation.com is for you. You can put it on ATV if you have nitoTV.

    Comment by Ramzy | August 19, 2010 | Reply

    • I used a mouse during installation and getting it all working. After that I don’t have a mouse plugged in anymore and it is all controlled with the apple remote.

      Comment by kmcital | September 20, 2010 | Reply

      • Does that mean you are watching it without the full screen?
        Are you able to make it full screen without the mouse?
        Thank you!!

        Comment by amy | October 30, 2010

  5. Is it that you are not using the mouse but you still have the keyboard connected?

    Comment by amy | October 31, 2010 | Reply

    • I manually edited the pref file on my Mac and copied it back over to the ATV, setting it to full screen at startup. But like I mentioned, this caused crashes, so I decided to leave it as non full screen, but centered the video. I don’t switch to full screen after launching it, so I don’t need the mouse or keyboard connected to it anymore after setup.

      Comment by kmcital | November 4, 2010 | Reply

      • I see, but how do you change the channels?

        Comment by amy | November 4, 2010

  6. I’m trying to figure out how to make remote buddy work…

    Comment by amy | November 4, 2010 | Reply

  7. The above website link no longer works. Do you still have the instructions or another link?

    Comment by Geoffrey | December 26, 2010 | Reply

  8. ditto on the link to the instructions being broken…

    Comment by jason | January 3, 2011 | Reply

  9. Sound very promising – I’ll defenitely try that.. 2 questions…

    Have you tried this with Apple TV ver.2 ?

    Does the channels navigate using the apple tv remote ?

    Comment by Thomas | January 10, 2011 | Reply

    • I don’t have a 2nd gen ATV, have not tried or heard about this working for it. Good luck!

      Comment by kmcital | June 9, 2011 | Reply


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