Slingbox

There are few things more beautiful in the arsenal of a traveling gadget bag than the ones that make life better. Enter Slingbox. You leave it at home so your whole TV can come with you!

Yes, it really is that magnificent. I have my cable TV coax, HD DVR and Replay DVR plugged into it. When I’m on the road, I log into the box via broadband internet, and the Slingbox has me controlling those device and watching my home TV shows from wherever I happen to be. Even if I’m literally on the road!

Slingbox is a pretty impressive red brick with some impressive encoding which is hard to disappoint considering what it is doing. I’ve used it in several different configurations:

On my Netgear wireless network at home I average a 4mbps video stream onto my laptop. The result is about the same quality as cable TV, which isn’t bad, but a cry from the HDTV quality many lead you to believe.

When I’m plugged directly into the LAN, I get a crisp 9mbps stream which is up near digital broadcast.

On travel I only get a 300kbs stream because that’s the upstream limit on for my home cable internet provider. 300kbs isn’t bad, falling somewhere around a high quality uTube video.

I use it directly on my cellphone (Moto Q) at about 20fps. Sure that’s terrible for sports, but on a 2.4” screen, you can only really do well with sitcoms or talking heads.

I also used to have a Razr with the broadband access that acted like the wireless modem which I could hook my laptop to. On that I averaged about 190kbs which is about good uTube quality. You may scoff, but I was watching TV full screen on my laptop driving from Dallas to Houston. That ain’t bad.

Geeky Applications:

• At home I now use my laptop as a portable 15” TV I carry from the bedroom, kitchen, living room and patio. This alone almost justifies it.
• My girlfriend logs in from her apartment so we can watch TV together or she watches/records her own shows on my equipment
• If you have multiple devices hooked to one TV and slingbox, someone else can watch another device other than whats on the main TV, without interruption
• If you have friends overseas (like my old boss from the UK), you can set one up just for you over there so you can watch their local TV and vice versa.
• Hell, use it as a robbery indicator. If you’re on travel and you log in and it’s suddenly gone… someone probably broke into your house and stole it. Call the cops!
  

Pros:

• TV Freedom! Watch & control your home TV from anywhere
  
• Home robbery indicator

Cons:

• At full stream there’s a 20 second delay for the buffer. If you send a command (change the channel) it wipes that buffer instantly so you get a lot of choppy audio/video when channel surfing. So just don’t channel surf.
• Only 1 (one) person can log into it at a time. There is no work around for this.
• Requires slingbox (free) software installed on computer so you can’t just hop on anything to watch
  
• Component HD input with multiple IR blasters, and PDA/smartphone software cost extra

Sure it could get you fired from work for watching sitcoms all day, but the trade off is being able to watch TV in traffic on the drive to the unemployment office!

Decent competitive alternative:

• HAVA Gold same idea, but allows multiple users with individual abilities to pause, stop, rewind etc.