Slingbox recording on Mac

If you've googled "mac slingbox recorder" you've come up against the brick wall.  It's hard to fathom, but somehow there isn't a Mac solution for recording the video feed of your Slingbox.  On the Windows side there is:

• At-Large Recorder - works fine but costs $70 ouch.
• mreplay.com - Browser plugin that lets you watch and record your Slingbox, but it lacks a lot of controls.  They said Mac support was coming, but the website/company looks like it halted any progress on anything for a year or two.
• SLR Slingbox Recorder and Viewer - basic recorder with timer that's free.

Because of SLR's basic nature, I was able to get it to work with Wine.  

Caveats

1. I'm not the author of any of these programs.  Please don't email me support questions.  What I know has been documented here.
2. I have very little experience with Wine and and its different Mac OS X distributions.  My setup is working with Wine Bottler, but that isn't to say that other distributions (e.g.,  CrossOver) won't work.

Install Steps

1. Download Wine Bottler.
2. Make sure you're updated to the latest Wine (version 1.2 at the writing of this blog entry).  This is done by opening Wine.app and then in the menu bar item going to preferences -> "Check for Updates now..."
3. Download SLR Slingbox Recorder (I used version .63)
4. (May not be required) Download the latest Mac OS X X11 implementation from XQuartz (I used version 2.5.3)
5. Open slinger.exe file you downloaded (this should launch X11/XQuartz).
6. Configure the application per the SLR manual.
• I use the "High Quality" preset.
• I increase the Video Bitrate to 8000.
• I couldn't find a way to increase the video size from 320 x 240.

Going Forward

This provides a decent enough mechanism for recording Husky games if we're away.  It would be nice to have a native Mac recording client though.  This should be accomplishable with the SlingBox SDK project on SourceForge.  It's C++ based (which I don't have much experience with), but when I get the chance, I definitely look forward to trying and compiling it.  If nothing else, making a Java port could get wider adoption or contributions.