Now that I am a road warrior again, I looked into the Slingbox as a way to get my TV from home anywhere that I am.  Here are my thoughts on the Slingbox.

The Slingbox is a new product that’s been out a year or so that is designed to allow you to stream your television content over a TCPIP network (that means the Internet).  The two things you will need, essentially, are a Slingbox and a computer to watch your television on.  The requirements for the network vary depending on your desires.

The first thing to do is to select the Slingbox that you want.  There are currently three models: the Slingbox Tuner, the Slingbox AV, and the Slingbox Pro.  Let’s look at them, shall we?

The Slingbox tuner has a coaxial input for standard cable systems.  The Slingbox will change the channels for you, so there isn’t any need for anything else.  But take note, if you have a digital cable or satellite television system (anything that requires a receiver box), then this Slingbox isn’t for you.

The Slingbox AV has regular White-Red-Yellow composite inputs with an SVideo input as well.  This Slingbox is designed to take the output from your cable or satellite receiver box and pump the signal to you over the network.  It has an infrared (IR) blaster that will simulate the signals from your remote control to change channels and such.

The Slingbox Pro is basically 4 Slingbox AVs in one.  It has 4 separate inputs, including a high definition (HD) input.

I elected for the Slingbox AV because, whereas I have more than one source of my television, they are in separate rooms and not easily plugged into the Slingbox Pro.

The setup went nearly flawless.  The Slingbox AV couldn’t get an IP address initially, but resetting the box got it to grab one.  The software setup is also nearly flawless.  Once I had it installed, it was time to configure the Slingbox.  All I had to do was tell it what sort of receiver I have and what my television provider is (DirecTV, in this case, with their DVR), and it was set up almost immediately.

The coolest thing is that the Slingbox AV duplicated my remote control perfectly.  It was as if a working picture of my remote was on my PC and I could click any button.

The viewing window said “no signal” so I pressed the “PWR” button on the virtual remote control and across the room my DirecTV DVR sprung to life!  Within seconds I was watching television on my PC through the Slingbox.

See, what the Slingbox does is it takes the input signal and encodes it on-the-fly, tayloring it to the speed of the connection, and pumping it down the network.  The player on the PC receives the signal and decodes it into a watchable  series of sounds and pictures.  And it looked great!  But then, I was at home, on my high-speed LAN.  How would it look over the internet?

When I got to my work destination, I couldn’t wait to try out the Slingbox.  I booted my lappy and connected to the hotel’s LAN and to the internet.  I had a few little problems finding my Slingbox because it was still looking at the local network.  I am not sure what I did to correct it, but it soon found my Slingbox over the internet.  Note, you will have to configure your router to allow the Slingbox application to connect through your cable or DSL modem, but the software has a wizard to guide you.

Soon, I was watching my recorded programs off my DVR 460 miles away!  The only downside was that as long as my connection stayed at 200kbps or higher, everything was peachy.  Remember, the Slingbox is encoding the video and sending it out, so there is a delay.  Anyone who has a TiVo or the like and another TV will know that what’s watched over the DVR is a second or two behind the live signal because the machine has to spend that time encoding the signal.

Which makes DVR watching a little more tricky.  Say I press the 30-second skip button.  Well, I am actually watching a few seconds behind (and it varies depending on the connection speed), so by pressing the button, the Slingbox knows that it has to sort of start over in it’s encoding and transmitting process.  Things can get a little haywire sometimes.  And in my hotel, with their crappy connectivity, it was not the most pleasant of situations.  But it was passable.

See, I would get about 10 minutes of 300+kbps.  But then, for no apparent reason, something would choke the connection to 60 or so kbps.  At this point, the Slingbox’s software tries to alter the encoding process, reducing the quality of the signal to keep up with the reduction in bandwidth.

I guess the moral is to make sure that anything you have running that may suddenly start perusing the intetrnet for information (Windows Update, Hamachi, XFire, email clients, browsers, etc.) need to be shut down.

So there it is.  I highly recommend the product.  But if you think that it’s going to be just like sitting at home watching your TV, it’s not.  But for those of us that just have to catch the latest episodes of their favorite programs that may not be on the hotel’s short list of stations, it is a great way to fill the need.

I aim to explore the player application more for settings that may make my viewing time more pleasurable.  I also aim to install their phone-based player on my TMobile MDA and see how that works out.

I’ll let you know.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Gadget, TV.