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Slingbox Buzz

July 2, 2005

slingboxIf buzz is enough to make you rich, then the folks at Slingbox are due quite a payday (despite having one of the more grotesque case designs I’ve seen in ages).

There’s a lot of talk about Slingbox right now, but I’m getting mighty frustrated about what’s not being said, namely a list of equipment and players that they thing is known to work correctly with.

At least there appears to be a general concensus about what it is and does.

In short, this box sits in front of a video source, encodes the video and audio, and “slings” it to a remote browser. The idea being that you can watch video from a source in your living room on the other side of the house, or even on the other side of the planet. You can even control the video source device from the keyboard of the remote browser, with commands being relayed to the video source via an IR blaster. Inputs are composite or svideo and stereo audio in (or analog RF, via an imbedded tuner), the output is digital video on ethernet.

They’re trying to baptize the whole concept as “Placeshifting” (as opposed to timeshifting), which is as good a term as any, I suppose.

So, that’s all great. Early reports are it even does the job quite well. I’ve read reviews of people using it with a Tivo, and people using it with an OTA signal source.

But what else does it talk to? It’s nice that they’ve mapped out the Tivo remote functions (apparently), but will it work with my Dishnetwork PVR? Or a Windows MCE box? Does it train from an IR remote?

Beats me, which is no doubt going to keep me from being an early adopter (No big loss — it’s not like I go anywhere anyway; I can stay home and watch stuff.)

If you’re intruiged, here are a couple of the better early reviews:

LiveDigitally’s Slingbox Debut Review
Slingbox411’s Pedestrian Slingbox Review

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Written by Chuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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Comments

2 Responses to “Slingbox Buzz”

  1. Blake on July 3rd, 2005 1:14 am

    Hey Chuck,

    first off, just like any universal remote control you buy (and also just like any tivo/dvr you buy), we have not posted a list of all supported devies from an infrared control perspective….we are actually considering doing such a thing however (i know it seems totally logical to have a list, but there are several reasons that this is impractical…i can go into details here, but it would take a while to fully explain it).

    Bottom line is that we support literally thousands of devices.

    It will DEFINITELY work with your Dish PVR. it actually also controls MCE (though i have personally never tried it…).

    we currently don’t train from a remote…the codes are built-in…we also have the capability (and already have) to load new ir codes via software.

    OH, and BTW:
    no need to be a traveller to use it. Turn your laptop into a wireless TV just around the home. watch and control that DishPVR from another room, or even on the mighty porcelin throne…or even in the hot tub…or in the kitchen.

    cheers,

    Blake
    co-founder, Sling Media

  2. Steve on August 1st, 2005 12:51 am

    Picked one up at Best Buy and it seems to work as advertised. Only one computer freeze has occured in about .5 hours of testing. It does not seem to broadcast out to the internet over a Verizon CDMA v620 card, I’ll try it on the T1 at work next.

    What would make this a Killer app would be a viewer client for the PSP.

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