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Wow, I had no idea the folks at Sling were readying a new version of their player!  I went to download the sling player on Sunday night and found a surprise – a beta of Player 2.0

 
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What’s so cool about this?  Two things, as far as I can see.  First, finally, the Sling Player has a pause button!  That’s right, you can see it down at the bottom of this image..  and I’ve blown it up here:

 
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Finally, I can skip over commercials when watching the sling player, rather than using the slow remote control capability.  But with that said, I could certainly see some improvements.

 

First, how about a user-definable buffer?  The buffer is just an hour, which makes no sense.  What if I want to sling a football game, and then watch it later? 

Second, why can’t I save my buffer?  At least for locked local viewing?

And third, how about a 30 second skip button?  That would be awesome.

 

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The next cool thing – they’ve added a program guide, that’ll let you tune your remote cable or SAT box by what’s on, which means no more slow-mo navigating the on-screen guide.  Powered by Zap2It, the guide loads quickly, and is easy to navigate.   Click on a show, and you’ll be immediately jumped to that channel (if you’re using the IR blaster – I’m not because my DirecTV HR-21 has RF remotes, but with RF enabled there’s no IR ability…  FAIL to DirecTV, but that’s another story).

   

Of course I want more.  Why can’t I schedule recordings?  Click on a show in the future, and have the Sling automatically connect, record and save.  That would be even more amazing.  And if they can do that, why not put the local box into slow-mo, and then record in slow-mo over the Internet, but then speed it up to real time so that I collect even more bits over a slower connection.  Why not?

 

There’s more too.  But suffice it to say that as a Sling User I love the new features.  But like anything, Sling, when you give me a taste, I just want more, more, more!

Oh, and you Mactards are just going to have to cry in your lattes.  It works on Windows only.  Check it out on the Sling Media Download site.

6 Thoughts on “Slingplayer 2.0 Beta Launches”

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