Awareness iPhone App INCREASES Ambient Sounds

Awareness ($5) is a new iPhone app that’s currently featured in the App Store and has been making the blogosphere rounds. The software works in conjunction with an iPhone’s mic and headphones to amplify any sounds in your environment that are louder than a specific threshold (which you set). Basically, background noise is ignored while … Read more

Android Home Automation App On Tap (CEDIA)

Blake Krikorian, the guy who invented the Slingbox (a vision we shared for a time), has set his sites on home automation. Basically, what started out as a personal project to consolidate control of all his gear has evolved into a commercial offering. And his Crestron Android app, dubbed R2, will be on display at CEDIA … Read more

Netflix in Canada: Launches This Week, Streaming Only

Interesting. Reuters reports that the Canadian Netflix service is set to launch later this week. And will solely offer video streaming. If I’d read my email a little closer a week ago, I might  have caught this tidbit earlier (see above). The decision to forgo physical media does seem to make good sense on a … Read more

Hands on the VLC iPad App (Pretty Good)

I got word that VLC officially hit the iPad and I was psyched. I had previously tested out the Xvid-playing app CineXPlayer to lousy results and recommended that you stick to Apple-approved formats for your iPad. Then an app calling itself “VLC” appeared. If you watch video on your computer, you probably know about VLC — it … Read more

Pandora Arrives on TiVo Today

First announced at the Premiere launch, Pandora’s music streaming service has (finally) launched on TiVo. Well, supposedly. The press release indicates it’s live, but I’ve yet to see hit my TiVo units this AM. While Pandora is a nice-to-have app, and compares favorably to Rhapsody in terms of pricing, I’d rather not manage or pipe … Read more

Doubletwist Android Player adds Internet Radio

There’s a new version of the doubleTwist media player app for Google Android, and in addition to support for playing music and podcasts on your device, doubleTwist 1.1 now lets you play online radio streams. You can access a director of radio stations by clicking the Radio tab on the home screen. From there you can … Read more

A Few Thoughts On Halo Reach Multiplayer

After giving up on Blockbuster (and Gamefly) to deliver Halo Reach in a timely fashion, I paid Gamestop a visit. I generally don’t purchase many titles given my short attention span for anything other than Call of Duty. But after 5 hours with Halo Reach, I believe it’s going to work out just fine. In … Read more

Question of the Day: TiVo Premiere + Slingbox?

tivo-premiere-slingbox

Today’s question comes our way from Stephen M:

Has anyone been successful at getting SlingPlayer or SlingPlayerWeb to control a Tivo Premiere? In the player setup, there are no choices for Tivo Premiere or Tivo Series 4.

This should have been a trivial question to answer, even though Sling hasn’t yet published an official virtual remote for the Premiere. Because TiVo’s IR codes and general remote layout are pretty consistent amongst their hardware lineup, classifying the Premiere as a TiVo Series3 or HD for the Slingbox should have handled just about everything other than the four OCAP shortcut buttons. However, after perusing Stephen’s lengthy transcript with Sling Media’s tech support, I realized something was amiss. And, unfortunately, Christina wasn’t able to deviate much from her script to identify that Sling has a problem on their end.

As it turns out, Sling’s online database of IR codes and remote skins has been corrupted or rolled back in some way. Perhaps related to their horribly botched data center migration that resulted in a week or so of downtime for many. Basically, in attempts to set up the AV source via Sling.com as two different TiVo models the remote skins were blanked out and non-functional in several ways/places.

What I did to resolve this problem was to set up the DVR (as a Series 3) in Sling’s stand-alone OS X software client. Once done, I headed back to Sling.com where the remote renders and works properly as seen below.

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