The primary functions that SlingSync serves is taking your media files and transferring them, taking your media files and converting them to a format your SlingCatcher can use (if necessary), or both. In any of these cases, this involves source disks and files, and target disks and files.
A source disk ...
- Is the disk that provides the multimedia files that you ultimately want to watch using your SlingCatcher;
- Can be the same as the target disk;
- Can be virtually any type of disk, network or local, as long as it can be mounted on or mapped to your computer;
- Can contain any mix of multimedia and non-multimedia files;
- Can be of any size;
- Can be of any format;
- Can be scanned for multimedia files by SlingSync, which writes a small index file to the disk to speed up future searches. (For this reason, you must have write access to a disk to use it with SlingSync.)
A source file ...
- Can be any of the file formats listed in the Preferences dialog box, Scan tab;
- Must be no larger than 4GB (2GB for some file formats);
- In the SlingSync file list, has a green dot if it is in a format that SlingCatcher can use;
- Has a yellow dot if it is in a format that must be converted before SlingCatcher can read the file;
- Has a red dot if it has DRM (Digital Rights Management) protections of some sort;
- Must not have any kind of DRM protections. Such files cannot be converted by SlingSync.
A target disk ...
- Is the disk that receives the transferred and/or converted files so it can be connected to your SlingCatcher to view these files;
- Can be the same as the source disk;
- Must be a USB 2.0 disk (required by SlingCatcher);
- Must be formatted using the FAT32 file format (required by SlingCatcher—note that, if needed, SlingSync can format your drive into FAT32);
- Can also be used to store any other kinds of files, including multimedia files not compatible with SlingCatcher;
- Can be scanned for multimedia files by SlingSync, which writes a small index file to the disk to speed up future searches.
A target file ...
- Is converted to Windows Media format with Windows Media audio so SlingCatcher can use it;
- In the SlingSync file list, appears with a green dot with a yellow sticker if it's been converted by SlingSync.