Slingplayer on Linux: Blah

So, I've gotten Slingplayer to run on Debian Linux, thanks to various how-to guides.

Previously, I got it to run on my Asus Eee laptop using the same guides. The audio and video quality were crap, though. At the time, I figured, oh well, the Eee just doesn't have enough horsepower to run Slingplayer under Wine.

But, my Debian desktop is much faster, and it still sucks:

• Video: The video quality is awful, though potentially tolerable considering this is all a hack.
• Audio: Fail, fail, fail. The audio skips constantly, gets stuck if you resize a window, and randomly will spew static for many seconds at a time.

Does anybody have Slingplayer working ... acceptably ... on Linux? Well enough that you could watch a whole half-hour television program?

As far as my tries at it, no matter what I run it on and how I configure it, it just blows.

Sling Media, I'm bummed. Where's the Linux client that Slingplayer should've had from day one?