TVSquad

This is both a pretty low tech, and a pretty high tech hack. Sling Media is beta testing a new feature called Clip+Sling, which will let you record on your PC or mobile device a short video clip of whatever you're using your Slingbox to watch. Then you can share that clip with your friends, YouTube style.

That's all great, but what if you've got a friend in Germany who missed seeing a friend win an Oscar, you've got the ceremony recorded on your TiVo, and you've got no way to get the video to him? Sure, this sounds like a crazy hypothetical, but it's exactly the position Matt Haughey of PVRblog found himself in last night.So what's a guy to do? Well, he knew he could use his Slingbox to stream the video to his PC, and watch it with SlingPlayer. But the stream is encrypted, and there was no simple way to copy it and send it to his friend. So he ran a high bitrate screen capture utility and created a 700MB file for just a few minutes of video. He compressed that, threw it up on YouTube, and mission accomplished.

It's probably worth noting that if he'd recorded the Oscars on a PC-based PVR, he could have used Orb to stream the program directly to his friend in Germany, since Orb can be accessed through any web browser. SlingPlayer, on the other hand is commercial software which requires a paid license.