I've had an original Slingbox for some time now. Recently I purchased a Slingbox Pro HD. For those that don't know, the Slingbox is a device that you connect between your cable TV and other components and allows that information to be viewed over the Internet.
Recently Slingmedia created a new iPhone application that costs $30 that lets you view your Sling content on the device. Unfortunately they don't support the older Slingbox for this feature. I don't believe there is a technical reason for this, just that Slingmedia wants to force older Slingbox owners to upgrade. Between this, and the fact that having HD support would be welcome now that my cable supports it, I chose to upgrade. (Plus Sling gives you a $50 upgrade coupon if you own an original Slingbox)
There are essentially two Slingbox units you can buy. The solo, which is like the old Slingbox where it takes a single input and displays what you are watching. So if you have a TV in the living room and you are watching Kojack on it. The Solo will display this over the Internet. And while you can change channels over the Internet, it also changes the channel of the TV in your living room. So if your wife is home watching TV and you're at work looking to catch the ball game. She probably won't appreciate you turning off Oprah to get the game at work. And, the Solo only controls one device. Which can limit its usefulness, though not greatly.
The Slingbox Pro HD is similar, but it has a passthrough for cable so that you can watch something other than what is being viewed on the TV. Although this only works with basic cable. You can still control your cable box, but the wife scenario would still take place. However, the one advantage here is that the Slingbox Pro HD picks up Clear QAM if your cable provider has it. My cable provider does pump out the local HD channels in Clear QAM so I can get basic cable and OTA HD via the Slingbox without disturbing the main TV in the living room.
In addition, the Slingbox Pro HD has three different inputs. One Component, One Cable Coax, and one Super/Composite. So you could control basic cable with one, A Blu-Ray player with another, and a DVR with the third. Though only one can be in HD.
The way mine is setup is that I have my HD DVR from my cable company running into the component portion. This allows me to watch things I've recorded in HD over the Internet. The composite input currently isn't hooked up due to a lack of a third component that I want to view. Although I'm thining of hooking up a video camera to it for watching over the house while I'm away. Not sure if I'm serious about that yet, and since I haven't done it, probably not.
The quality of the feed on the local network is exceptional. I can watch the HD content on my PC in the other room and it looks just as good, if not better, than my HDTV. Primarily because my monitor is at a higher resolution than my TV is. There are no drop-outs or stutters. It just works great, as expected as my old Slingbox worked great as well.
The only caveat to this, is that my 3 year old laptop that has a Pentium M processor in it struggles with the video quality. It is incapble of rendering the HD video fast enough, and I had to lower the resolution of the broadcast to 640x480. Even then, it can stutter. This is a limitation of the speed of my older laptop, but also indicitive of the resource hungry nature of the app itself. Time for a new laptop, I suppose. (I'll wait until Win7 is out)
When watching a video on the software, it knows what device you are using (Because you set it up) and it presents you with a remote control that is an image of your remote that came with your product. So you can easily control what you are watching with it. Common buttons are also mapped to the keyboard, such as the cursor keys tied to changing the channel and space being the select button, etc.
This all works rather well. Over the Internet broadcasts also look really good, but you need a pretty good upload speed to get HD quality. The software automatically adjusts the picture based on network conditions and there can be an optmization phase when you first connect while it tries to figure out what combination of features is best. Obviously local network stuff is superior looking to stuff sent via the Internet, but it's a minor quibble. It all looks really good.
Local content can take up to 8mbs of network speed from both devices. If your are using a 802.11g wireless, you'll find that your quality will be lessened (Which tops out around 5mbs) but the quality is still excellent. Basically, the faster your network, the better the quality, but even with poor network speeds the end result is more than servicable.
The iPhone application is still pretty new but does work rather well. It is slower to respond to remote control commands and ONLY works via WiFi. No 3g support from AT&T. Part of the reason for this, as well, is that 3g tends to switch between 2g and 3g depending on your network conditions and for non streaming applications this can be transparent but something as bandwidth heavy as the Slingbox makes it more difficult to put up with. Still, I was able to use a Verizon MiFi to allow my iPhone to hop on the Verizon 3g network and was able to watch television pefectly so long as I didn't try and drive around. Perhaps the next generation of wireless will help solve these issues.
Overall, it's a good product to get your non PC products onto the Internet so you can watch video from afar. Technically you can control the Xbox 360 with this device as well. So you could potentially play a game on it, though it would have to be something turn based as the control response is far too slow for any sort of action game. You could also control a PS2 if you have one with an infrared port on it. So technically you could play some RPG titles on your iPhone. Though it might be hard to read the text.
I give the whole thing a thumbs up. It's a bit pricey around $300. But if you find yourself away from home often, or like the idea of being able to view cable at work. You might want to pick one up.
|