What The SlingCatcher Does Well

The SlingCatcher does a very nice job playing DVD archives.  If you have your full DVD's ripped as folders, then you will get around the 4 gig file size limitation. You are able to select which title set you wish to play.  Once playing, you can choose if you want DD5.1 audio (No DTS support at this time,) or any of the other audio tracks available on the DVD.

DVD's are shown in the media list with a little disc icon next to them.  A DVD can be present on the drive as either a DVD folder structure (the Video_TS folder with the associated files is all that is needed) or a DVD .ISO file.  But keep in mind that most DVDs are larger than 4 gigabytes; if you have a lot of .ISOs you may wish to convert them to folders.  The name of the top level folder of a DVD archive is the name that shows up in MyMedia.  Inside that folder is your Video_TS folder.  Additionally, a very nice aspect of the MyMedia software is that if you put a JPEG image file in the top level folder, this shows up as the DVD artwork when selecting the movie on the Catcher.  It can be named anything, as long as it ends in .jpg (other image formats were not tried - your mileage may vary) and should reside in the top level of the DVD archive.

When you select a DVD to play, you are given the option to play the main title or any other titles in the archive.  At this time, you cannot choose to play a specific chapter from the playback menu, but will instead need to navigate there on your own once the video starts playing.

Single Title Set DVD

Multiple Title Set DVD - Main Title shows up when you have selected what is seen to be the main title on the DVD)

When playback begins, you are given a progress bar that shows the name of the DVD being played, the title and chapter along with the time remaining.  The OPT and Mode keys work similarly in MyMedia as they do in SlingPlayer for TV.  The Mode button is almost identical and won't be covered here.  Pressing OPT gives you the ability to select the audio track you wish to hear.  Unfortunately, there is no way to tell which tracks are commentary tracks and which are normal stereo audio.  The 5.1 track is a given, however.

Pressing the Option key a second time takes you back to the progress bar which hides after five seconds or so.  If you wish to see that progress bar at any time during playback, you can press the OPT button on the remote.

Navigation through the DVD is a simple and fluid experience.  Play, pause, and stop work as expected.  The Skip Ahead and Skip Back buttons take you forward and back in chapters.  The FF/RW buttons scan forward and reverse through the DVD.  You can speed up the scan by using multiple presses of either the FF or RW button to up to 3X speed.  At 3X speed of FF, if you wish to decrease the scan speed, you then press the RW button to decrease from 3X to 2X and so forth.

While paused, if you press FF, the video will start playing forward in frame by frame slow motion.  Additional presses will gradually speed it up.  Pressing RW while in pause takes you back to the normal RW function.  There is no backward slow motion (which is something that is VERY difficult to do in digital media, as I understand it.)

All in all, SlingMedia did a very nice job on the user interface and the functionality of playing back DVD media. Let's move forward to see how the SlingCatcher handles other types of media files.

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