Pros: Excellent quality and performance. Easy to set up and excellent compression/streaming technology.
Cons: Integrating it into a little more complex home network can be challenging.
The Bottom Line: I love my Singbox AV. Many of the new DVR's coming out allow Internet streaming of their content, but the Slingbox is even compatible with many older devices.
yuenp's Full Review: Sling Media Slingbox AV Remote Control
I purchased my Slingbox AV a few weeks ago and have been very impressed with its quality and performance.
Out of the box, my first concern was that it only had inputs and no outputs. This means that there’s no way to pass the audio/video signal through. Instead, unless the device I intend to connect with has two sets of outputs, it requires that I split my AV out of the source with Y-splitters between the Slingbox and my TV, degrading the quality of my home experience.
As it turned out, it didn’t seem to degrade the quality that badly.
It’s intended to control one device, but if you’re creative with your installation, you can control two. The back has an input for standard composite video and S-video. You can control one device on composite and one on S-video. It means, however, that you have to figure out how to share the audio in between the two devices because there’s only one set of audio inputs. I use an AV auto-router switchbox.
Once you have it integrated into your home theater setup, the next step is initializing it to work with your home network.
In most cases, this is a snap. The Slingbox AV has profiles for several standard consumer-level routers and brands so it can configure your router to enable the outgoing port. The problem I ran into was that it didn’t recognize the VOIP router that I was trying to plug into. The instructions were very clear about how to work-around this configuration, but after several tries and manually configuring the router, it still wouldn’t allow the port access through the VOIP router.
Eventually, I had to reconfigure my home network and run the Slingbox through my WiFi-G router, which it was able to recognize and configure automatically.
All that to say this: the simpler your home network, the easier it will be to set up. If you are running broadband through WiFi and using a VOIP phone service, things tend to be a little more complicated and can make initial setup more challenging.
Once I got things up and running, I had to configure the Slingbox through a computer connected to my home network. All that consists of is selecting the brand and model of the devices you are connecting from the vast list of available supported devices. After that, I secure the Slingbox with a password, and I’m ready to go.
Each computer, Pocket PC or Smartphone that is going to take advantage of the Slingbox must have the Slingbox software installed. Any device that is connected to the home network can auto-detect the Slingbox and auto-configure itself to work with it through the LAN and via the Internet. If you want to connect to the Slingbox from a computer that is not in the home network, a long ID code must be typed in so that computer can access your computer through the Internet; also an easy setup.
For Pocket PC’s and Smartphone users, a $30 software package must be purchased from Sling Media. They provide you with a 30-day trial online. Setting up the Pocket PC/Smartphone is also easy, especially if done from within the LAN.
The quality and performance of the finished product is astonishing. Obviously, over the LAN, the quality is going to be good, but even over the Internet, I’m amazed at how good the quality is, even over a 256K upload stream from my home broadband service.
I am able to consistently watch and control my DVR and DVD, remotely with a sharp image and 24-30 frames per second at 320 x 240.
I use a Samsung i720 SmartPhone with Windows Mobile 2003. The Pocket PC framerate is right around 15-20, which is still quite good. I’ve also found that using WiFi with my phone kills the battery very quickly, so I’ve been connecting my phone to the Internet via Bluetooth connection because of it’s low power-consumption. The download bandwidth over Bluetooth is roughly 50-100K… but because I can manually adjust the streaming settings, I can still get a continuously high framerate and decent picture.
The one element I’ve not discussed is sound. Amazingly, even using Bluetooth’s slow bandwidth, I’m able to get rich stereo sound through my Smartphone.
I can’t express enough how happy I’ve been with the Slingbox AV. The ability to watch anything from my DVR, set recordings, watch live TV and even watch DVD’s from my phone has been an amazing step in time-shifting and place-shifting technology.
Redirects the TV signal to the computer of your choice--providing high quality video, no matter the distance SlingStream technology delivers up to a 4...More at Amazon Marketplace
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