Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Wayne asked: “I recently purchased a Galaxy Tab 2S. I’ve had my Dish system updated with the SlingBox so I can watch from my tablet on the road. I’ve gone through the setup and followed their instructions. Changed movies to “mobile base”, transferred them to the tablet. Everything looks good. Go to play them on the tablet, and nothing comes up. Just get a blank screen. Shows they’re transferred, they’re on the list, they just won’t play. Need some help. I’m getting frustrated.”
The Slingbox support forums are filled with complaints from users that the tablet version of Sling Player isn’t working on Android 5 or later (Lollipop). Apparently you can use the phone version of the Sling Player on your tablet, but that plays back your content at lower resolution than the tablet version, so it’s not surprising that users rejected that.
Sling says the problems with Android 5 are now resolved and most users seem to agree that in fact the tablet version is working again, but there definitely were some issues not long ago.
So what that means is, it should be working for you now. But you might want to try downloading the phone version of Sling Player to your tablet just to see whether it works or not. If it does, but the tablet version does not, then it may still be a problem between Sling Player and your version of Android.
We presume you’ve already tried the basic stuff, like deleting and reinstalling the app, restarting your tablet, and so forth. Ultimately, you might have to reach the point of resetting your tablet to its factory settings (which you should only do in extreme cases because you will lose any data on the tablet that is not backed up somewhere).
The final thing to consider is whether this is a failure of the app or a problem with the specific content. You said this happened with movies, but what about other content? TV shows? Does nothing at all play on your tablet, or do some things play and others not. That might be a content issue where the digital rights don’t allow the content to be played on the mobile device.
If there was a cut-and-dried works-every-time answer, we would certainly share that with you. But there isn’t and plenty of people are reporting that tablet watching is working fine, so I’m afraid it’s going to come down to something about this app running on your specific tablet.