Dish Anywhere for Surface Pro... someday?

sclaws

Supporting Founder
Original poster
Supporting Founder
Sep 8, 2003
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Aurora, IL
Having just upgraded to the HWS I am surprised the Surface doesn't have an app for Dish Anywhere (unless I'm totally missing it). I've also been scraping the alleys of Google and don't see much info about it. Is there any new info about this?
 
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You are asking about Surface Pro, not Surface. Surface Pro is just a regular Windows PC, so it should be able to run Dish Anywhere in the browser without any problems. You don't need an app.
 
Right, the Surface Pro is just a laptop running Windows.

But to use the Dish Anywhere website you have to use the desktop version of IE (or another browser) because the 'modern ui' version doesn't support plugins.

One way to have both a 'modern' touch-friendly look and feel is to use Chrome and set it to be the default browser in the Start area.
 
But to use the Dish Anywhere website you have to use the desktop version of IE (or another browser) because the 'modern ui' version doesn't support plugins.

What makes you say that? I just tried Dish Anywhere in the New Windows UI version of the Internet Explorer (in Windows 8.1) and it seems to be playing fine. I didn't have to switch to the desktop version.
 
I'm surprised at that. I never actually tried it as everything I've read said it needed a plugin and plugins are not supported in the modern ie.
 
I'm surprised at that. I never actually tried it as everything I've read said it needed a plugin and plugins are not supported in the modern ie.
Perhaps that's true for Windows RT and the non-pro version of Surface.
 
Maybe Dish Anywhere just falls back to HTML5 to make the video play without plugins?
 
I'm working with the Surface Pro 2. When I tried to launch Dish Anywhere in the ModernUI I was sent to a screen saying the browser needed to be 32-bit IE or Chrome, and it would not play content. Once I tried it using standard Chrome in the desktop, it worked fine so I stopped messing with it :)
 
Strange. I don't have a Surface Pro, but everything plays fine on my (64-bit) Windows 8.1 laptop inside the Modern UI. I just checked and Dish Anywhere uses Adobe Flash, which is built-in in the Internet Explorer 11, including the Modern UI version of IE, so no plugin installation is required.
 
Strange. I don't have a Surface Pro, but everything plays fine on my (64-bit) Windows 8.1 laptop inside the Modern UI. I just checked and Dish Anywhere uses Adobe Flash, which is built-in in the Internet Explorer 11, including the Modern UI version of IE, so no plugin installation is required.

I just tested it on my Yoga 2 Pro w/W8.1. I can play online stuff, but not anything from my DVR. It says it doesn't support sling.

Are you trying to play something on your DVR or a streaming show?
 
I have both a surface rt and a surface pro 2 and I can confirm that you cannot sling from a hopper to a surface rt (or any rt based device) regardless if you are using the modern browser or a desktop browser. This is due to the fact that the sling plugin that is required for this capability to occur is an x86 application which cannot be installed on an RT based version of windows.

As for the surface pro 2, I sling from my hopper all the time using either the desktop version of IE or Firefox, works great and I've had absolutely no issues.

Windows phone falls into the same boat as RT devices, no app in the app store and no ability to install the sling plugin, maybe this will change with windows 10 but I doubt it since the user base of windows phone is miniscule compared to android and ios.
 
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When I have tried using the Dish Anywhere app on a Windows 8.1 laptop using the "modern" IE, I got an error saying the plugin does not support 64 bit browsers. If you are running a full 32 bit version of Windows 8.1 (not RT like on a Surface) then the Dish Sling plugin should work just fine. I hope one day that Dish will at the very least offer a version of the browser plugin that runs on ARM devices like Windows Phone, as they do have a Slingbox app for that platform. I am not going to hold my breath though. For now I am sticking with Android for my phone, but may get a Windows tablet like the WinBook HW801 which runs a 32 bit version of full Windows. It should run the Sling plugin just fine. It will not, however, support mobile transfers.

*edit - and yes I know the Sling app runs fine in desktop IE as well as Chrome. I am using both right now on a laptop running the Windows 10 preview.
 

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