anyone have a slingbox?

sweetie

I see they have come down in price recently (bargain alerts). any thoughts on ease of use/quality etc?

robinph

Yep, got a couple of them that I use. Very easy to setup and use, just need a slightly decent upload speed on the network connection that you have it plugged into. The quality is fine when watching and as good as the quality that you'd see on youtube videos so only an issue if your using a big widescreen monitor, perfectly fine for watchin in a window on your desktop or smaller screen though.

sweetie

I have a 6 meg link so that should be fine. thanks

J-blk

Yeah I got one recently too - extremely easy to set up and use, quality is quite good on my internal network, even full screen on a 24" monitor it doesn't look any worse than when the cable box was feeding into a TV tuner directly. Haven't gotten the chance to use it outside my network yet...

Sling Player 2.0 beta for Windows was also just released, which adds some PVR functions, like the ability to pause live TV and creating a 60 minute buffer that you can rewind/fast forward. It also adds a built in EPG, though this is US only at the moment:

http://downloads.slingmedia.com/go/desktop-us-beta

sp1derman78

Definitely recommend it. I work away a lot and its great when your in a hotel and you can watch what you want. I have mine hooked up to my Sky+ box so can watch anything I have recorded on it or live TV. The Slingplayer software even displays the Sky+ remote on the screen to use.

J-blk

sweetie wrote: »

I have a 6 meg link so that should be fine. thanks

That'll be your download speed though - my 20Mbps UPC connection is only 1.5Mbps up by comparison. I think a lot of the Eircom resellers still have upload speeds of 256Kbps which probably won't cut it for the Slingbox streaming externally.

sweetie

J-blk wrote: »

That'll be your download speed though - my 20Mbps UPC connection is only 1.5Mbps up by comparison. I think a lot of the Eircom resellers still have upload speeds of 256Kbps which probably won't cut it for the Slingbox streaming externally.

yeah I realised that. I do have 512K upload though which should be enough.

cheers

robinph

I've two running fine from uploads of less than 512k. One is only on 256k and the other is something like 300kish, the connection speed that the Slingbox actually creates is changed automaticallydepending on the screen size, connection and device that you happen to be connecting to it with at the time as well. I'm currently watching the Olympics OK from one setup in the UK and the speed is currently showing at about 230kbps, the picture is perfectly viewable, although the score displays can occasionaly get slightly blurred if the action on the rest of the screen is moving too fast.

J-blk

I'm not 100% sure how reliable the Kbps rating on the Sling Player is though - at least on the internal network. I almost exclusively use the Mac OS X variation of the player though and I've noticed that it peaks at around 2500Kbps but other times drops as low as 450 - 500Kbps with no noticeable difference in quality (which is good, but again, not sure about how reliably the player is reporting the streaming rate). It's good to hear that it all works externally on lower upload rates too, I'll eventually be looking to use it remotely.

robinph

It shows the really high numbers when I'm streaming within the same network alright. But I think its actually pretty good at only actually transmitting anything that really needs to be, if the picture isn't changing much then it will use a lot less bandwidth for that bit, it's also buffering quite a bit which could account for the numbers continually changing.