Sling to stream in HD

[whurlston]

From http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?la...=CA6516827

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Sling Media has cooked up a device that can fling high-definition content from a cable set-top box to a personal computer over a home network -- and potentially even over the Internet.

The Slingbox PRO-HD, which the company plans to demonstrate at the Consumer Electronics Show next week, will be able to stream up to 1080i HD content (which has 1920-by-1080 screen resolution) to PCs over a user's home network.

According to Sling, the device can also deliver HDTV over the Internet to a remote location if the broadband connections on both ends are fast enough. In some cases, the company said, as little as 1.5 megabits per second has proved to be sufficient to provide HD streaming over the Internet.

Moreover, the PRO-HD may be used to deliver high-definition video to another HDTV set via the company's forthcoming SlingCatcher.

The Slingbox PRO-HD includes multiple inputs and outputs, including digital audio and a digital ATSC/QAM tuner. The box has a $399.99 suggested retail price and is slated to be available in the third quarter.

The company released a lower-end HD-capable device with a suggested retail price of $179.99, the Slingbox Solo, in September.

Also at CES, Sling will demonstrate its SlingPlayer Mobile software working on Research In Motion's BlackBerry Pearl 8120, which allows Slingbox owners to watch their home TV programming. The BlackBerry version of the software will be available later this year for $29.99.

Sling Media is a wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar Holding Corp. EchoStar acquired Sling last fall in a deal valued at $380 million.

[sub]

Other than this, I predict you'll see options at CES to capture high def signals from your HD set top boxes to your PC....

[whurlston]

That would be great news. Unfortunately it will just make me regret even more that I will not be at CES as I planned. I can live with that though.

[sub]

Hauppauge has been showing a new product at CES which will capture high def up to 1080p using component video input from HD set top boxes. The device hardware encodes the captured video to H.264. It also includes an IR Blaster to change channels on the set top box.

Ok, its not as nice as a cablecard solution which doesnt require a set top box, but at least it'll give US users a way to record high def versions of their premium channels.

They indicated there will be a press announcement in the next couple of days with delivery date and pricing.

[flyswatta]

I was wondering if Hauppauge would make a capture card that would accept component input.

[pastro]

Ok I wasn't going to bother you guys with our press releases but here is one from CES on the ViXS Xcode 3290


XCode 3290 Features:

• 400 MHz Dedicated Application Processor
  • Multi-processor architecture
    
  • Availability of additional processing power via multi-processor architecture
• Multiple Integrated Peripherals
  • Dual Ethernet, Dual SATA, and Dual USB ports
• Multiple Interconnects:
  • PCI, PCIe, and Host Bus Interface (HBI)
    
  • DDR2 and NAND Flash
• Multi-stream HD/SD Video Transcoding, Decoding and Encoding
  • MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 Part 2, MPEG2, VC1
    
  • Bitrate Reduction, Resolution Reduction and Format Conversion
    
  • High-speed Transcoding up to 16x real-time
    
  • Support for iPOD, iPOD Touch, iPhone, PSP and other portable device formats
• Fully integrated security
  • Cable Card, Smart Card and DVB Common Interface (DVB-CI)
    
  • Multiple Encryption and Decryption Engines (including 3DES and AES)
    
  • Multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme support