The Slingbox is a very cool invention that allows you to watch your home cable on any PC virtually anywhere in the world.

I bought this device primarily to watch my home football team while I was traveling.I have used it in hotel rooms, lobbies and airports it works pretty well and the picture is pretty good most of the time. It has multiple inputs, for those that care it has a S-video, composite input, and coaxial plus a Ethernet port.

There is no built in wireless.. I thought that was a real weak spot but I have ethernet ports to spare so it was nto a big deal to me.

Another slight warning. This is not a passthrough devive, there is no output on my device so you have to have the extra “output” jacks on your Cable Box.

The hookup is relatively simple they have a quickstart guide. You basically plug the outputs of your Cable box into the Slingbox and plug the slingbox into a Ethernet port connected to you local network. It also comes with Infra Red (IR) devices which you position on top of and under the Cable box so it shines were the IR receiver is on the Cable Box. By default the slingbox does it’s magic over the 5001 UDP Port but this is configurable and that is a good thing. Many of the routers and ISP out there block port 5001 by default. You may need to change this port.

There are many help guides out there on how to do this it involves something called port forwarding. If you need to take this approach and the Slingbox does work out of the box I suggest you set a static IP address and not the use DHCP. Port forwarding work only with static IP addresses in most routers. Personally I have my Slingbox setup with a static IP with port forwarding enabled on port 5001. This means that the firewall lets in and out port 5001 to the internet.  

The slingbox has a few options and one is that it tries to constantly tune the picture to the available bandwidth. I find that it tries it best to give you a usable picture. The quality of the picture I have found depends on several things.  

The speed of the upstream portion of your Internet connection is very important I’d say anything less than 1 MB/sec upstream speed will not consistently produce a great picture when watched. But it can vary and that’s my opinion 

The connection of the downstream link you are watching from is just as important. Again too slow and the picture will be grainy and not very watch able. 

So how do you watch this thing remotely?  

Slingbox has a player called “Slingplayer” it open up a player to view the TV itself and then also a remote control, I’ll include a screen shot on this from mine. Once you have this up the Slingbox tries to find your Slingbox. It can do this either through a registration scheme 
server to the Slingbox site they look it up through what they call a“finderID” which is a very long Hexadecimal string or a text alias, something like “my Slingbox”. If you know the ip address of your LAN connection you can have it open the player that way.

If all goes well a “Slingbox directory” popup box should show up and you click on the “Watch” button and it should connect. It then connects to your Slingbox and you are ready to start viewing. Remember it works just like your Cable box so to watch you have to hit the power on button, I will show
 mine in the sidebar as a picture.

I think you will enjoy this device and watching your TV remotely I like it and it works for me. So if your looking for a way to stay in touch locally on the road or just visiting somewhere and want to watch your own stuff, Give this a shot.  

Here are my Pro’s and Con's  

Pro’s:

• Great remote picture most of the time. 

• High Def TV available on higher end Slingbox models mine is not high def. 

• Relatively easy setup 

• Watch TV anywhere you have a broadband connection. 

• Works for me of a Sprint WAN card

• Great device for those that travel and want to stay in touch locally

• Optimizes bandwidth. To give you the best picture.. it adjusts.  

Cons: 

• The Slingbox AV is an end unit no pass-through. 

• Only one person or computer can access the Slingbox at a time. As I understand

• this is because of broadcasting copyright concerns.

• No wireless built in.  

• RF units that control the Cable Box are a little hard to attach and make stick.  

• Upload rate of your connection is really the key to the picture quality 

• Firewalls and blocked ports can be an issue.  

• Slingbox tries to use UDP port 5001 I had to setup a high order port to get mine to work  

• No output ports on the Slingbox