I know some of you are going to skipit. At the same time, I get e-mail kvetching that I’m not writing enough about technology. So there it is: I ain’t gonna satisfy everyone. And in a way, that’s the pleasure in doing my own stuff: I write for myself, sharing with you what gives me a kick in the pants, and take delight when some of you enjoy coming along for the ride.

Enough editorializing. Here’s my long, tedious, sometimes boring story about the new way to watch TV.

Watching Downloaded Movies on Your TV

“Watch movies on my PC? No way.” I was talking to one of my cousins, not one of the brightest bulbs in the family. It took me a few minutes to explain how he could send downloaded movies — as well as other Internet content, such as TV shows — to the TV in his living room.

For the last few months, I’ve tried two devices that sit near your TV and grab video content from your PC. Even in this dreadful economy, neither one I tried is terribly expensive — and there are no monthly charges.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll explain how these media streaming devices work. To help you decide if you want one, I’ll talk about the pros and cons of how each model works, and some of the setup hurdles. I’ll also show you where to get movies and other video content, both legal and — hold onto your seat — illegal.

This week I’ll cover the hardware; next week I’ll tell you where to find movies and TV shows on the Internet. I’ll also tell you about a MediaGate portable media player.

Making the PC-to-TV Connection

I tried two devices: Sling Media’s $200 SlingCatcher, and MediaGate’s MG-800HD, about $240 discounted. I’ll have specs and descriptions for you in a minute. Of the two, the MG-800HD is the hands-down winner.

The two are roughly the size of an external hard drive and come with remote controls with the usual array of features; the MediaGate includes bookmarking and fast-forward to speeds of 16X. Each device connects to your TV using component, composite, S-Video, or (if you have a hoity-toity big screen) HDMI inputs, and each supports both standard Pal and high-definition video, up to 1080i.

Audio-out is a typical left-right stereo or (if your TV has it) coaxial or optical digital. Each device has USB and network inputs, and supports Windows XP and Vista.

Connections: Pros and Cons

Understanding the five ways these products–and others like them–push a movie from the PC to your TV will help you understand which one is the best fit for you.

External Hard Drive: Copy the video files onto an external hard drive or Flash drive, and connect it to the device’s USB port.

Positives: About the easiest method — literally plug and play. The movie starts almost immediately. The hard drive can store lots of movies; the size of the Flash drive limits you.
Negatives: You’ll need to buy an external drive, or Flash drive, and schlep it to your computer to delete movies you’ve watched and refill it with new movies; the drive can be noisy.

Internal Hard Drive: Install a hard drive into the device.

Positives: Installing the drive isn’t difficult; again, the drive can store lots of movies and the movie starts almost immediately. It’s handy to take the device with you to, say, a hotel, or a friend’s house, and connect it to their TV to watch movies. (You can do this with an external hard drive, too, but it’s not as convenient.)
Negatives: You’ll need to buy a hard drive– mine is 40GB; detaching the device from the TV and bringing it to your PC to load more movies is a hassle; the drive, and small fan in the device, can be noisy.

Hard-wired Network: Movies are sent from your PC or server over your network, hard-wired from your router, using standard network CAT 5 wiring.

Positives: You don’t need an extra internal or external hard drive; all file management is done on your PC; with a network connection, and access to the Internet, you watch YouTube and view other content directly from the Internet.
Negatives: You’ll need to have a network cable running from your router to the device at the TV. Configuring the device to recognize the network ranges from a five-minute job to being lengthy and challenging. You’ll also need to have an available port on your router.

Wireless Network: Movies are on your PC or server and beamed over your wireless network.

Positives: You don’t have to crawl under the house to lay cable; as with the wired network, you won’t need an internal or external hard drive; all file management is done on your PC; access to Internet content.
Negatives: Like the hard-wired option, setup can be difficult — or surprisingly easy — depending on your computing skills and the complexity of your network. Streaming can sometimes stutter if the distance between your Wi-Fi router and the device is great, or if there are walls blocking the signal.

Screen Capture: Whatever is displayed on the PC’s monitor is captured and streamed to the TV.

Positives: The device doesn’t need codecs, so you can watch any video that displays on your PC’s monitor — YouTube, Windows Media Player output, Netflix streaming video, and even PowerPoint presentations. (For details on codecs, read A Fix for “My Video Won’t Play!”). Installing the device is straightforward.
Negatives: You’ll need to have a network cable running from your router to the device at the TV; Wi-Fi isn’t available. Poor-quality video on the PC looks worse when displayed on the TV. The PC has to be turned on and you have to start capture software from the PC; it takes a while to get used to the interface.

And then…nothing happened. For a long time. But I met with Sling co-founder/CEO Blake Krikorian today, and am happy to report that the release of Slingcatcher, which Krikorian said turned out to be a more challenging engineering project than anyone expected, is imminent. It’s not exactly the box that Sling unveiled in 2007: It offers a wired Ethernet connection but not the Wi-Fi it was originally going to include, and costs $300 rather than the sub-$200 pricetag that Sling targeted. But it’s still an intrguing product, and one which–like the Slingbox–is unique.

The SlingCatcher is a small box which looks like a close relative of the Slingbox: You plug it into a high-def or standard-def TV via its HDMI, component, or composite video connectors, and hook it up to your home network via Ethernet. It includes no on-board storage, but a couple of USB ports let you add capacity via external hard drives or thumb drives.

The box lets you watch video from your PC–both stuff residing on its hard drive, and stuff you can stream across the Internet. And it does so in two ways:

–SlingProjector. This is the SlingCatcher’s most inventive feature: the ability to watch any video you can watch on your PC on a TV, regardless of format or copy protection. It involves a piece of Windows software that lets you select a window or region on your PC’s display; the software then “projects” that selection, complete with audio, across your network to the SlingCatcher. The SlingCatcher plays it in full-screen mode, using the same video-processing technology seen in the Slingbox to maximize crispness and maintain smooth playback.

According to Blake Krikorian, SlingProjector will work with absolutely any video. (At the moment, that video needs to be in a windows that’s open on your desktop, but he said that the Windows Vista version of the software will soon let you minimize the window once the video’s playing, so you can watch Internet video on your TV while doing something else on your PC.) As a test, I asked Krikorian to project video from PCWorld.com, which uses a proprietary player and doesn’t have a full-screen mode. It worked–and even though the video plays in a teensy window on the PC, it looked better than I expected in full-screen mode on an HDTV.

The bottom line with SlingProjector: Unlike other Internet-video-to-TV solutions such as Apple TV, it’s it’s designed to let you watch YouTube, Hulu, video from providers such as network sites, or anything…including video sources that don’t exist yet. And it looks like it should work.

–SlingSync. This piece of Windows software finds video, audio, and photos on your system, converts them into formats that the SlingCatcher can deal with as necessary, and lets you copy them to a USB hard drive or thumb drive. You can then attach the drive to the SlingCatcher box and enjoy your media using the included remote control.  SlingCatcher supports tons of formats, including lots of obvious ones and some not-so-obvious ones, such as VOB files (which lets you watch ripped DVDs, though SlingSync won’t do the ripping itself), DiVX, and formats used by DV camcorders.

What SlingCatcher can’t do right now is to stream or download video directly from Internet sources–unlike Apple TV and Vudu, among other devices, it requires a PC in the equation. (And both SlingProjector and SlingSync are Windows apps, although Sling is working on Mac versions.) But Krikorian told me that Sling intends to upgrade SlingCatcher later with “native” services–video programming it can grab across the Net without a PC as middleman.

Oh yeah, the SlingCatcher has a third major feature: It lets you sling video from a Slingbox to another TV, either across a home network or the Internet. (Until now, Slingboxes have only been able to transmit content to PCs, Macs, and phones.) That’s not necessarily a moneysaver, since the SlingCatcher costs the same as Sling’s top-of-the-line Slingbox. But if you’ve got a TV in the living room with cable or satellite and/or a DVR, it’ll let you send that programming across the house to a home office, or over the Net to a vacation home.

Krikorian also told me about another Sling product, also due shortly: the Slingbox PRO-HD. This $300 Slingbox variant, which replaces the Slingbox PRO, is the first one that can stream HD content and preserve its high definition on the other end. In the demo I saw, the improvement in picture quality was instantly obvious.

So what to make of the SlingCatcher? My impulse wass to compare it to the Apple TV, but they’re really more different than alike. Apple TV provides extremely simple access to a limited selection of content at a price ($229) that’s lower than that of the SlingCatcher, with a 40GB hard drive thrown into the equation. SlingCatcher is aimed at folks who want all the video the Web has to offer on their TV, and are willing to set up the “projecting” part on their PCs–and if they’re folks who also own Slingboxes, all the better.

Speaking of which, I asked Krikorian whether Sling would build a box that was both a Slingbox and a SlingCatcher. He called the idea “SlingKing” and said that Sling would like to do it when it can figure out how to do so at a price that makes sense.

I also asked him about the possibility of a SlingPlayer client for the iPhone: He said that the company’s working on one and hopes to have it ready for Macworld Expo next January.

More thoughts on SlingCatcher once I’ve had a chance to try it in the comfort of my own living room…soon, I hope.