# Hopper - Sling viewing on Linux



## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

I'm quite sure this is covered elsewhere, but I can't find it with an hour of searching so I'll ask again.

I am running Xubuntu 12.10 on my laptop and just got the "new" Hopper/Joey rig here at the house. Works great! I can see the guide and see the content of the DVR in my browser (Chrome). Problem is, of course, the videos won't play and it refers me to sling support page which lists Mac and Windows versions that work with the Dish Anywhere / Sling player.

My fall back position is going to be running this in my XP VM on this system. However, if there is a way to make it run native in Linux, it would be a whole lot better.

Anyone have any advice about this? I tried creating a web page to launch the embedded sling player like this:

http://slingplayer.slingbox.com/embedded/slingplayer.php

Open this page in Chrome and it works, but it says that the embedded Sling player is not compatible with Dish Anywhere.

I added the Dish Anywhere extension to Chrome, which would probably work of course, except that the Dish Anywhere page loads the "not supported" message rather than kicking off the video. It's like it's checking the OS version and browser version before attempting to view the content.

Has anyone had success making this work? Or is there a discussion somewhere I could go read that will shed more light on this?

Myy next idea is to try and find a Chrome extension that allows it to specify which OS is reported to the server. Anyone tried something like this?


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

Replying to my on post ... just so I don't forget.

If I launch chrome like this:

google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 7.0) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.172 " &

or 

google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.172 " &


Then instead of the "not supported" message, I get the "Page Disabled" message :

Eeek! The page you are trying to access requires connection to your DVR(s), and we haven't been able to connect to them.
We will continue trying to connect in the background. Feel free to close this message, but beware that some things might not be working properly.

I'm not sure if this is progress or not. It would at least load the content of my DVR before.

Gonna keep hacking.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I'm afraid the target is covered with intention to milk some money from you, like buying Sling Adapter or/and Linux applet to get all functions...


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

As far as I can tell, there's no Linux applet available. And my Hopper already has sling, doesn't require an adapter.

Problem is that they don't seem to recognize Linux as a valid OS.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I think we should come to same initial level: you're running some program on your Linux(x86) to process streaming from Sling part of H2; *the program/applet* should know how to establish a session with that part what is running on H2 (Sling server) ...
So, where we know ?


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

P Smith said:


> I think we should come to same initial level: you're running some program on your Linux(x86) to process streaming from Sling part of H2; *the program/applet* should know how to establish a session with that part what is running on H2 (Sling server) ...
> So, where we know ?


The "Program/applet" in this case is the browser. Google Chrome. It works fine on Windows (with Google Chrome) and on Mac OSX (also Google Chrome), both with the identical plug-in.

But the dish site refuses to host the data to the Chrome browser on Linux, because it thinks it fails some OS check. The OS check is, of course, checking to make sure you have a modern OS (WinXP or later, OSX Leopard or later, etc.), but it just doesn't acknowledge that Linux exists.

So the idea here is to fool the dish web site into allowing the Chrome browser in Linux to access the data just as it would Chrome operating in Windows or OSX.

I hope this further explains the issue.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I'm missing your result with the config: Linux->WinXP VM->Chrome->Sling applet [Chrome's plug-in].


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

P Smith said:


> I'm missing your result with the config: Linux->WinXP VM->Chrome->Sling applet [Chrome's plug-in].


I'm quite certain that will work. I would just prefer to run it native.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

for native support you should start pestering dish's SW dept ...


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

Does anyone have input on this issue besides "pester Dish"?

There is no technical reason this can't be made to work, at least not that I am aware of at this moment. So I am looking for practical assistance.

So please, whomever has tried it or heard about trying it, please speak up.


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

Mr.72 said:


> Does anyone have input on this issue besides "pester Dish"?


Have you tried your own suggestion?


Mr.72 said:


> Myy next idea is to try and find a Chrome extension that allows it to specify which OS is reported to the server. Anyone tried something like this?


DISH is selective in what they support ... which is why I agree with P Smith's use of the word "pester" in this case - contacting DISH would likely not lead to a solution. They have chosen the systems they support.

Unfortunately the overlap of your universes is small. While you are probably not the only one who is using Linux and wanting to stream DISH Anywhere finding your soulmate may be difficult.


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## Mr.72 (Feb 2, 2007)

James Long said:


> Have you tried your own suggestion?


Yes, that's what the command-line launch above did... caused it to report either Windows 7 or OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). In both cases, it fails to see the DVR on the network. I'm going to keep hacking at this and see if I can find a workaround.



> DISH is selective in what they support ... which is why I agree with P Smith's use of the word "pester" in this case - contacting DISH would likely not lead to a solution. They have chosen the systems they support.


Yeah, well Linux guys are pretty used to this. And in most cases, we find a workaround. I was guessing someone on these forums already plowed this ground, but maybe I'm the first.

BTW I did try using it in a Windows XP VM. This works, but even over the LAN the video is very choppy and slow. I am sure this is due to running it on a VM. Everything is slower in the VM.

I am going to dig some more about user agent settings and see if I can find a way to make this run in native Linux Chrome. I may also try running Chrome/Windows on Wine and see if that is better than the VM. Still consumes more memory and resources than running it in a native Chrome tab but probably far better than the VM solution.

I'll update here if I find anything that works. I'll keep checking back in hopes someone else is checking in and may be able to assist in making it work. Perhaps the minority of us Linux users can band together and come up with a good solution, which is what the Linux community usually does.

For proof, I am writing this while running Chrome browser on Ubuntu 12.10 on an Acer C7 "Chromebook", which is not even supposed to be able to run Linux to begin with. Linux guys tend to find a way .


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## knoxbrder (May 18, 2013)

Any luck getting this to work? I'm on Ubuntu 13.04 with a Dell XPS 12.


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