anyone have a slingbox and if so is it worth it in terms of picture quality and does anyone use the slingbox mobile?

6/7/2006 3:10:51 PM

I own one, got it about 2 months ago.

It was well worth it IMO. Hooked to your LAN, any computer that's directly connected to your LAN gets full quality streaming television that looks suffers NO downgrade in quality. Of course, you need to set your monitor to 640x480 or either watch it in a smaller box to avoid pixelation, as there's no way for the SlingBox to "upconvert" the standard 640x480 TV signal to anything greater than that.

Setup is a BREEZE. The included software makes setup insanely easy...excellent implementation of the software.

As for viewing it from afar by logging in w/ your laptop, I haven't tried this as of yet. But I will in about 3 weeks. My purpose for getting it was to 1) watch it when I have a laptop near WiFi and 2) watch NCAA games and such *while at work!* Hopefully the network at my new job in 3 weeks won't block the ports, or else I'll hafta find a way around it.

You can find literally hundreds of reviews of this thing by searching for it at http://www.amazon.com; notice that 95%+ of them are very positive, and usually the happy customers speak the least, so that's saying something.

It's a great item to have if you have any uses for it like I do

[Edited on June 7, 2006 at 3:16 PM. Reason : ;]

6/7/2006 3:15:35 PM

is there not a software solution to stream video from a tv tuner card-equipped pc? it seems unlikely to me that this would be worth $200.

6/7/2006 4:51:51 PM

But a SlingBox can control your DVR, so you can record a show at midnight and then use the SlingBox software from your work to tell your DVR to go back and play that show to you remotely.

6/7/2006 5:19:05 PM

who watches tv at work though? I can see how the remote access and control is cool and all, I just don't understand why this requires hardware other than a pc. They already wrote the software, why unnecessarily balloon your operating costs and price point. Unless they're banking on people being more comfortable buying a box from Best Buy than purchasing and downloading software from some company they've never heard of on the internet.

6/7/2006 6:02:49 PM

i'm pretty sure they're banking on the "it just works" factor

6/7/2006 6:30:27 PM

at my job I have plenty of down time during the week and I'm more interested in using it on my phone than a laptop.

6/7/2006 7:04:59 PM

Quote :

"is there not a software solution to stream video from a tv tuner card-equipped pc?"

Ive used a video capture card and web cam software to watch TV remotely. The downside to this is you can't change the channel(At least I couldnt figure out a way). I would imagine with slingbox you can change the channel remotely? Someone who has one can say.

6/7/2006 7:33:25 PM

^ Absolutely. The software provides a channel-changer box on the side and you just mouse click to change channels. What this does is tells the built-in NTSC tuner within the SlingBox to change the channel, which it does and broadcasts the new channel to the user.

6/7/2006 7:51:13 PM

I'm a little behind the times, but this looks like a great solution if you move out of your favorite sports teams market and have a friend that still lives there. This would have been great for watching the World Cup at work compared to the 6" black and white TV we had.

Now it the price would just come down a bit.

7/18/2006 7:43:10 PM