Slingbox

[Jack Hogoboom]

Any Slingbox fans out there? I just got one and set it up last night. It worked great (once I plugged everything in correctly ). The only bummer is that I can't use it at work because we are seriously firewalled and the head of our IT group refused to open a port for me ("it's not you, it's the 30 people that will want to do it after you....").

Should be fun when I am away from home. I'll be able to watch all of my TiVo'ed woodworking shows from my hotel room.

[Joe Pelonio]

I have a question about that. When you are in the hotel using it, do the rest of the family at home still have normal unlimited access to the cable system at the same time?

[Jack Hogoboom]

Joe,

You literally take over control of your cable box. If they're sitting in front of the TV watching channel 5 and you switch to channel 7, it will change the channel they are watching. The Slingbox beams the signal from the cable box. If you have a two-tuner cable box or TiVo, you can probably avoid that, but I purposefully attached it to a TV that doesn't really get used all that much.

Jack

[Joe Pelonio]

Ah, so if you have multiple cable boxes in the house you just comandeer the one that's used the least. Of course the bad part of that is anyone at home can turn on that TV and see what you are watching!

[Joe Pelonio]

This is an old post but I have an update. Since my daughter and her husband are moving to Italy for close to a year, they bought a slingbox which we installed last night on the cable DVR in my other daughter's room. This will allow them to record and watch TV from their room in Naples. The box was really easy to install except for the issue we had with a brand new DVR that did not yet have a slingbox driver for the infrared signals. A quick google came up with the solution, using the driver for a different model and it worked nicely from the laptop both here and then later when she went home to Seattle and tried it again. The picture on the laptop is not the same as a real TV but a lot better than watching Italian TV or repeats of U.S. TV with Italian dubbed over.

[Neal Clayton]

if it's cable and not satellite, you get the basic channels without the box, you could just plug it into a spare outlet in the wall somewhere. you only need the box for premium channels.

i used to use one to watch football at work on the weekends myself.