I thought the encoding side might give me grief.

On the whole I'm quite pleased with VLC. There's a heck of a lot you can do with it. The mosaic below was set up on a machine made from bits with just a DVB-S and a DVB-T card installed. Ideally I'd like to get the slingbox output on there, but you can't do that as they encrypt the stream. I'd also like to funnel the output of this mosaic to a real TV, hence another use for the slingcatcher.