Shared Knowledge
“Slingbox AV”
It is my own fault for not
doing more research before I jumped, but when I received my Slingbox via
How many people have an
Ethernet cable beside their cable box or Tivo?
Oh, but the Slingbox people
are ready with an answer. For another $100, you can buy from them a power line
Ethernet connection. One end connects to the Slingbox and power beside the
Slingbox and the other end connects to an Ethernet router and the power line
near the router. Now according to Slingbox, this is a 100MBPS link, which is
fine and dandy but my cable modem only uploads 512KBPS maximum so a 100MBPS
link really does not buy me anything over going with a 802.1G WIFI Bridge at
54MBPS and I have had very mixed results in the past with sending signals over
the power lines in a house.
Now once I got my Slingbox
working with a new Dlink Ethernet to WiFi box (getting the Dlink to talk with
my network is another story altogether), Slingbox software could not
automatically adjust my Linksys router to allow for remote access, so I had to
manually go into the Linksys and set up a port for Slingbox to use. This was
not difficult as I have been into the Linksys software before and even knew
where to set up the port for Slingbox, but for some, this is not a walk in the
park and certainly not plug and play.
Now with the Slingbox software
installed on my laptop, I started the Slingbox player and did see the control
for Tivo but had trouble getting any of the Tivo control buttons to respond to
my mouse clicks. The problem, of course, is with the position, placement of the
Slingbox IR emitters. I hate these things, these IR emitters. Dam glue on them
just not hold the emitters in place and getting them just right is also a pain.
Anyway, finally, I got the emitters in place correctly and could control my
Tivo box from the Slingbox player application.
Now as to video received via
the Slingbox player, on my old 877MHZ, 256MB of memory laptop, I have had to
reduce the quality of the Slingbox stream to have any sort of video, which is
not choppy. This, however, is not a problem on my main computer, which is
running at 3GHZ, 2GB of memory but how many folks are going to be lugging a
3GHZ desktop around?
The Slingbox player
requirements state a 1GHZ processor or better and I think they do mean what
they say. Slingbox will run on a slower machine, but with reduced video
quality.
Ethernet? How much more could
it have cost to build in WIFI?
Oh, I contacted Slingbox about
the Ethernet port business and there response was that 70% of their users locate
their cable modem and router right at the Slingbox and television. Perhaps this
is so, when a house hold has only wireless laptops but would be a royal pain for
me with 3 desktops going 24\7 in my office, all tied to my router via Ethernet
cable.
Update: 11 July 2007:
Took my Slingbox software equipped laptop with me on a recent trip to Spain. Via a wireless "B", 11 MBPS, Internet connection, Slingbox came up right away and worked as it had at home, except for the fact that the audio preceeded the video by some 2 or 3 seconds. To fix this problem, I moved the Slingbox performance setting to the full right or maximum bandwidth and processor requirements.
After using Slingbox successfully for 2 days, for some reason I forget now, I deceided to play around with Slingbox settings and during a Audio\Visual setup, aborted and then could never get the Slingbox software to find my Slingbox again. When I got home, I reset the Slingbox and all was well. My point here is that do not play with Slingbox settings remotely as settings adjustment may require a manual reset of Slingbox.