My TV Is In A Sling

In an earlier post, I’d mentioned my recent acquisition of a Slingbox from Sling Media. As promised, here is a more detailed account of my experience with this device.

I picked up the device at a nearby Circuit City. A $50 instant rebate promotion was about to run out, which was what prompted me to take action. When I got to the store and poked around, I couldn’t find one. I caught the attention a sales associate, and after checking inventory said the system reported having three units in store. After running laps around the PC and Video areas, he finally went into the stock area and came back with one. Not sure why they didn’t have at least one on the shelves.

After bringing it home - it was too much to bear to not dive right in and install it. I repositioned the furniture so I could get behind the A/V cabinet and got down to business (you can peek inside my living room setup here). My D-Link router is positioned right behind my Panasonic Plasma TV, so getting it connected to my network was easy. Next came the video and audio hookups. I simply used the Slingbox as a pass-through - running S-Video and Audio L/R from my ReplayTV into the corresponding inputs on the Slingbox, then running running the same cables from the Slingbox outputs to the inputs on my TV. Not to be overlooked was an IR Blaster cable that would allow the Slingbox to control my ReplayTV DVR. Overall, probably 30-45 minutes to complete the physical setup. The Slingbox device itself is amazingly small. It reminds me of the shape of a bar of silver or gold (the kind you’d find in Fort Knox).

Next came the software setup of the SlingPlayer program, which I installed on my HP Pavilion zt3380 laptop. Knowing that the CD that came in the box was most likely out of date, I downloaded the latest version from the Sling Media web site. The software installation was quite easy. Once I got the application talking to the device, I went through some wizard type screens that completed the configuration and made sure the Slingbox could talk through my router to their backend system (which is what allows you to “find” your Slingbox when you are away). Then I selected what type of device was connected to the inputs so the SlingPlayer could emulate the correct remote control (in my case, a ReplayTV 5000 series box).

Once that was set up, I kicked the tires and played around streaming both live and recorded video content from Slingbox to the SlingPlayer on my laptop. Needless to say, quality was pretty decent, but that is not surprising because it was on my home network. The true test would come when I streamed video from the Internet. And what a perfect opportunity to do this when I was in Las Vegas for CES 2006. So as soon as I got to my room at Treasure Island, I ponied up $10.99 for 24 hours of high-speed access and gave it a whirl.

The Sling Media engineers did a great job on video compression. Mind you, you have to have the right expectations about what kind of viewing experience you will have with this device. Naturally, the quality it is highly dependent on what kind of bandwidth you have at that moment in time. But overall, I was very pleased. You can watch in a re-sizable window, go full-screen (which technically doesn’t expand the picture edge-to-edge), or in SlingBar mode, which docks it on either the right or left side of you screen and resizes all other application windows automatically. The picture quality is what you’d come to expect from most streaming video on the Internet. Interestingly, when you operated any buttons on the remote, the video quality would suffer a little, but only for a few moments. In some instances, and this must be by design, the video and audio would slow down slightly, I’m guessing to compensate for dips in speed. I loved the SlingBar mode, which allowed me to catch up on e-mails while having my local news in a window on the side of my laptop screen.

Over the course of several days, I watched some recorded shows plus a little live local TV. There were some shows I purposely didn’t want to watch until I was back home. Battlestar Galactica needs to be viewed on my home theater system to do it justice. At one point, I had some warped fun by freaking my wife out with the Slingbox. She was in the middle of watching one of her all time favorites, Grease, when I logged in from Las Vegas and took control of the ReplayTV. What I was really trying to do is pull up a specific menu that would let me enter in text characters on the TV screen - I wanted to type “Call me at hotel.” As I was trying to pull up the menus, she was countering every move. She must have thought the TV was possessed. In a manner of speaking, it was. After a few moments of this electronic tug-of-war, she figured out what was going on and called my cell. She didn’t see the humor in it, and I promised not to do it again without her knowing in advance.

So that about sums up my initial experiences with Slingbox. Ironically, I didn’t get a chance to hook up with them at CES, which I regret. They had some exciting announcements to make, including streaming to WiFi or 3G connected Windows Mobile Devices as well as a Mac version of the SlingPlayer (announced at MacWorld SF). So kudos to Sling Media for allowing Professional Couch Potatoes like myself to “Take Your TV Anywhere.”

[tags]slingplayer,slingbox,sling media,panasonic plasma tv,s-video,ir blaster[/tags]