Watch premium cable shows controlled by Slingbox using Chromecast

The problem:

You've installed Slingbox and gotten rid of some cable boxes. Yay! Now you want to watch a premium cable sports channel on one of your tv's that no longer has a cable box, but okay bummer because with Slingbox, that means having to wire up your computer to your tv. I don't wanna!!!

Now a brief summary of Chromecast and Slingbox:
1. Slingbox lets you watch tv on a big screen, controlled by your computer, from any cablebox in the house that has a slingplayer attached. But your computer has to be wired to your tv, because what you're really doing is using your tv as a large external monitor. Boo.
2.  Chromecast lets you throw whatever is running in Google Chrome onto your unwired TV but you can't get everything you want running in Chrome or a Chrome app. For example, the premium sports channels.
 
So, you might think, just use Chromecast in conjunction with Slingbox, right? Almost. If you do that, all you get on the tv is a black screen. The two devices don't play so well together.

The solution:

Use the Facebook version of Slingbox, and it will work. Just install the Slingbox app in Facebook, remember that you have to run Facebook in Google Chrome, then click on Slingplayer in your Facebook apps and sign in. Then just cast the tab to Chromecast.

Note:

On my network it's a little sluggish, but that's the next hurdle.

Chromecast mp4 plays audio only -- solved!

It's February 2014, and like many of you, I've been pounding my new Chromecast to see what it can do. I have lots of ripped MP4s on my NAS device, but couldn't get them to run in Chrome on my Windows 7 computer. The audio worked, but not video.

Here's what I did to fix it:

1. Open Real Cloud player. It's here: www.cloud.real.com and sign in
2. Upload the faulty MP4. The Realplayer Cloud folks report that they pretty much convert whatever you upload to them.
3. Then download it again. Make sure to choose "Download MP4" and not "Download."
4. Now drag your downloaded MP4 to Google Chrome and it works.

Remaining problems:

1. Now that it works, I find that my network isn't fast enough to make it look good on my television. It's a little pixelated and sluggish.
2. When running it from my hard drive, it's in a small window unless I click on full screen. But clicking on full screen means my display is dominated. I cannot use other Windows functions.


Because of the above two remaining problems, I tried checking out the same video in the Realplayer Cloud, and found the quality to be just as degraded. The only benefit of the movie in the cloud is that my computer is still usable while the movie is playing.

I may need to return to my original movie source, and re-rip to a different format.