Slingbox

Darren Wright

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Any Slingbox owners here? Or owners of another "Place Shifting" type of device?

I'm looking to stream live tv over wifi from one of my cable boxes at the house so I can watch the football games from the shop on the laptop or perhaps one of those new wifi connected tv's. Not wanting to run cables across the yard since my new wifi connection between the house and shop is working so well. Just curious if anyone has one and how well it works.
 
Done a little more research and looks like Belkin makes a nice device but has wifi built into it, which would be good since I don't have an Ethernet connection close to the tv. The belkin mobile app is $12.99, which seemed high until I saw the $29.99 price for the SlingPlayer app. So may be leaning towards it.
 
Darren i am thinking why dont you get a small smart tv that has wifi built in and facilitates the DLNA sharing system. I just upgraded our TV after coming to grips with not being able to lift the old one and bring it into the new home. I had not looked at tvs for some time but have been amazed at what the manufacturers like L.G. have built into their sets. Really a case of technology coming of age inmho.

Would be money well spent in my view because you could do way more with the Tv that way. Will require more dollars in the budget though. Thinking aloud i dont know whether the "smart tv options" are available on the smaller screens so thats something you would need to check.
 
Darren i am thinking why dont you get a small smart tv that has wifi built in and facilitates the DLNA sharing system. I just upgraded our TV after coming to grips with not being able to lift the old one and bring it into the new home. I had not looked at tvs for some time but have been amazed at what the manufacturers like L.G. have built into their sets. Really a case of technology coming of age inmho.

Would be money well spent in my view because you could do way more with the Tv that way. Will require more dollars in the budget though. Thinking aloud i dont know whether the "smart tv options" are available on the smaller screens so thats something you would need to check.

Does your tv share it's cable programming with other devices?

I'm mostly looking at being able to share our cable and dvr recordings where ever we are. Also would like to stream the NFL games up to the shop since I haven't found a reasonably priced on-line way to watch them live.

I've found a couple of 32" smart tv's in the $200 - $400 range that have the netflix, hulu, web browser, etc. options built in. They would work fine for the on-line streaming, but to stream the cable live or recorded I'd still need a "place shifting" device.

btw...Isn't it amazing how light the "large" tv's have gotten? My 50" plasma probably weighs in around 100 lbs or more, but one of our 60" LED's here at work is only around 30-40 lbs.
 
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...Thinking aloud i dont know whether the "smart tv options" are available on the smaller screens so thats something you would need to check.

Depends on your definition of "small", but the smart TV my dad bought recently was 32". I tried to convince him to go bigger, but he didn't want the TV to be wider than the stand he was putting it on.
 
Belkin looks interesting. I didn't know about it.

I have bought a WD tv live streaming device a few days ago and I really like it. It can play pretty much any file format that you throw at it. It also has DLNA and wifi built-in. I wasn't getting a good wifi signal near my tv so I bought a WD Livewire (Ethernet over electrical wiring device) and I have been very pleased with it too. I also like the repeater ($118) that Costco carries. I have installed it in a large home and a client's warehouse and haven't heard any complaints so far.
 
I'll have to take a look at the WD device. Those powerline extenders work pretty well, if you can get them on the same phases. I just upgraded wifi routers a week or so back. I had bought a D-Link router, but it was only broadcasting at 9db on it's highest setting. I returned it and got the Cisco, which is broadcasting at about 23 db.
 
Yup I made the mistake of assuming again. Went through all the features of the new tv last night which i had not yet done and sure enough it can do all sorts except make tea and broadcast that which comes from the service providers box. Dang. So we now need a server and it probably needs a hdmi input to be able to take the cable decoder hdmi output and serve it up to the network. Sorry for the red herring Darren. Neat thing i like is i can browse the forum on the big screen in unbelievable text clarity and at the same time have the TV picture on the screen. LG have this remote they call magic remote which is wand kind with mouse type arrow on screen and thumbwheel. It takes a bit of getting used to but is quiet a tool. So one can have football on and be browsing the forum or web.
 
Looks like with those smart tv's they will probably allow a slingbox or @tv app to be used so you could at least watch the same show on multiple tv's throughout the house. Looks like the WD device Mohammad posted has the Slingplayer app for doing just that.

I'm still leaning towards the Belkin device. My wife asked me this morning what I wanted for an anniversary present. This was probably the first time she's asked me that type of question and the answer wasn't "a 1911", so she was OK with "a Belkin @TV Plus". :)
 
Well I have had the older analog version of slingboxfor several years. It doesn't get much use now that I went to dish. I wish I had waited a few months for the digital tuner model but I used it on analog with a vcr as the tuner. It actually worked well enough for some things around the house. My connection was nowhere good enough to get a decent signal from it on the road. I need to try it again on my dish second receiver as it would be compatible with that non HD output. On my satellite receiver the 2nd one is analog only. That said I really enjoyed mine back in the day and it impressed my son so much he bought one at the time.

Garry
 
What's wrong with doing that?

I know, right?

Many moons ago my wife at the time and I bought a cutting-edge TV...27 diagonal inches of awesomeness, and it had stereo sound. Stereo! Imagine that! :D For our TV stand, we just put a blanket over the hand-me-down console TV we'd gotten from one of our grandmas, and viola!
 
Found Best Buy had the Slingbox Solo for $99 and free shipping (normally $179), so ordered one. Two things stuck out, 1) they are established and seeing the slingplayer app on more and more devices and 2)the solo supported 1080i, where the Belkin was only 460p. For the savings I could also afford the ipad app if we decide to buy it. Also the WD Live device that Mohammad just got has slingplayer as an app, so wouldn't need to use a computer to play the football games in the shop.
 
Brown delivered the Slingbox today. Took about 5 minutes to patch in the cables and attach the ir blaster to the cable box. The setup took about 20 minutes, mostly doing a firmware upgrade on the device, but was pretty easy.

During setup it asks you to identify the cable box and who your provider is, then gives you a local tv guide and an on-screen remote that looks like the one that came with the cable box. The player will determine the best screen quality based on your connection speed, but can over-ride that if you wish. The player also does buffering and can pause for up to 60 minutes and still watch your program, great for skipping commercials. :)

I watched the first half of tonight's football game up on the shop computer and had high quality the whole time.


Watching it now on the laptop at the house side by side with the browser (using the slingplayer app).
 

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