First impressions of the slingbox

[Analoguesat]

Well my Slingbox arrived yesterday so I spent this morning setting it up.

(Cost - £142 from Maplins using a discount voucher)

First impressions:

From the pictures I was expecting something in a brushed aluminium case but its actually an all plastic case. Setup was simple enough - the only problem I had was connecting the cables up to the dreambox - its VERY tight for space in our AV stack under the telly so I had to wriggle into all sorts of uncomfortable positions to get the cables connected to the back of the box.

It is recommended you connect all the cables before putting the power on, so I did that, having run a long ethernet c&ble round the fireplace temporarily so I could connect to my router. I have my router set up as the dhcp on my network so the new toy was assigned an IP address automatically. Having connected everything up I ran the software.

This decided I needed newer software, so I download the 34meg new version of the player. I ran this and it told me the firmware was out of date....... so I allowed it to update as well....

So far so good. Getting to this point had taken just over an hour, although much of this time was spent lying on the floor trying to reach inaccessible sockets on the back of the dreambox.

Slingbox setup was easy enough - you run the wizard and allow it to configure itself. There seems to be a built in DTT tuner, although it didnt pick anything up from our aerial.Now I dont know if thats because of a poor tuner, or becuase out tv aerial is rubbish. It could well be the latter simply because its never been the same after a heavy snowfall a few years back left it with a bent mount, and an unfortunate meeting with a set of ladders left it with a couple of battered elements. I'll be replacing it later in the year at which point I will try again.

Running the setup wizard again allows the analogue channels to be stored, and a third time allows for setting up the dreambox.

Streaming across my lan onto the computer seems to run ok, the picture below shows a desktop grab of the whole thing up and running. Comparing the pictures with the direct pics from the DB shows there is a horrible lag from live - obviously caused by the digital encoding ready for streaming. No good at all for inrun betting away from home!

Ive asked Stick to do some tests from Galashiels to the south coast of England to see how resilient the service is, and I will be seeing if I can get it running from work - however our corporate firewalls may cause problems. No harm in trying though!

When we have done some tests we will posts some comments about how well it all runs across the net.

[Analoguesat]

Ive been looking at the slingbox forum, and as you can connect most av sources to a SB it turns out many folks use them for security monitoring - connect a camera to them, set it up as an "uncontrolled source" and away you go - a cheap security monitoring system.

[alder191]

hi , i have a slingbox £99 from pc world, excellant, can even access it from my nokia n95 mobile, plugged into my sky+ box, excellant streaming, no picturefreezeing, can even change channels, and watch from the sky planner