dallas moore

Slingbox Pro

Just one of those things that I’ve kinda been wanting … a Slingbox!

My computer room has been lacking something.  A computer.  I’ve had my computer parked in my living room right in front of the television so I could watch and surf.  Stupidly, I have it set up on the coffee table where I sit awkwardly on the floor.  By the time I’d get up, my legs would feel awful.

I’ve wanted to set something up so I could watch my Tivo upstairs.  I had three choices.  I could somehow rig up a video system via custom cabling through an AV system (expensive, but high quality sound/video).  Buy a second Tivo (also expensive and causing me to incur a second monthly fee and buying a SECOND non-HD Tivo system).  And then there’s the Slingbox…

The only real problem I had going in was the video quality.  I knew it wasn’t going to be super crisp because it was being compressed and streamed over my local network.  To make matters worse, I use a wireless network bridge between my entertainment center area and upstairs.  This means that the streaming speed would be reduced further because it has to go between the slower wireless portion of my network.

Setup was straight forward to use the Slingbox Pro over my local network.  I had everything working on both my Windows XP laptop and my iMac within 30 minutes (including the download time for the software).  My wireless access points (Apple Airport Extremes) don’t have the option to forward ports to DHCP clients.  Once I had it up and running, I tinkered with the network settings so it wouldn’t use DHCP and I can hopefully access the Slingbox anywhere.

So far, things are going well.  I do need to tinker further to see if I can get my DVD player streaming.  I also have my local (analog) cable working fine.  But the main thing, having my computer actually in the computer room and being able to watch my Tivo there has been accomplished.