Digital Trends

Sling Media Slingbox March 6th, 2006 | by Vince Veneziani

Setup and Use

The packaging for Slingbox is simple and shows the product right away. Tear open the box and you'll find a bunch of cables for hooking it up to your TV, DVR, or whatever, IR controls for your cable box/TV, a power cable, and software. Setting up the device is pretty painless. Just decide how you're going to hook it up (I chose to use my cable box and used composite) and what you'll be hooking it up to. Don't forget that you can use Slingbox with your DVR and DVD player, in addition to your cable box. Then, all you have left is to hook the Slingbox up to the Internet. You'll obviously need a router to both hook up and view your Slingbox. After that, just install the included software, follow the instructions, and ten minutes later, you'll be watching TV!

Let's use my setup as an example. I hooked up my Slingbox to a Motorola cable box in my living room. I placed the IR controller in front of it and then tucked the obscene amount of cables behind my entertainment unit. My router is an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station, which only has one available Ethernet port. The Slingbox is compatible (with some effort) to work with multiple routers, but I decided my Xbox Live could take a break while I tested the Slingbox. I also use all Macs, so I had to get a Sony Vaio laptop to test Slingbox, as they aren't releasing any Mac OS X software until Q2 of this year. My problems aside, it still set up painlessly and I got going in no time. If you want to watch Slingbox outside your home network, you'll need to configure your router to do so.

When I installed SlingPlayer, the software used to watch Slingbox, it was essentially no frills. After updating it, however, I (thankfully) found lots of nice features and an improved interface. The first thing you'll notice about Slingbox is that it truly takes over your television. Change a channel on Slingbox and the channel will change on your regular TV set. Mute your show on the TV and your SlingPlayer won't have any volume. This is a very important factor to consider if you have a few people living in your home. You may want to get an extra cable box to use with your kitchen TV. In that way, if everyone's watching a show in the living room and you're in the den with your laptop, you won't be playing tug-of-war with the remote.

Software in Windowed Mode

However, the fact that Slingbox acts as a remote is a nice feature sometimes. For instance, my cable service is Comcast and I happen to particularly enjoy the on-screen guide used for finding shows. Sure enough, if I hit the “Guide” button in SlingPlayer, all it does is bring up the guide that I normally see and allows me to navigate it with arrows. SlingPlayer comes with a customizable soft-remote that is used to control your Slingbox. It works great and has all the features of a regular remote control, so I praise Sling Media for not screwing up here.

Because you're watching your television over a network connection, delays are expected. The two-second delay I have between my laptop and television set while watching shows is fine. One thing that drives me nuts, though, is the delay with switching channels. Bringing up my on-screen guide screams lag and takes forever to load—about three seconds. This is on a 3Ghz laptop with 512MB of RAM and great video, etc., so I worry about what it would be like with a slower machine. Eventually, you get used to it and start memorizing favorite channels in order to speed up the process.

I'm sure Slingbox is great with a desktop computer, but it really shines with a laptop. Slingbox opens the floodgates of being lazy to a whole new degree. Now I can stay in bed with my laptop and watch TV there instead of having to go upstairs and lay on the couch. The quality of the video is pretty darn good and audio is superb. After spending a day with Slingbox, you will achieve a new status of couch potato-ness, I assure you. Before Slingbox, you'd never have the ability to waltz into your local Starbucks with a laptop, sit down with a drink, and watch cartoons. Now the only choice I have to make in the morning is whether I'm in the mood for Scooby Doo or Ren and Stimpy.

Flawless, though? Almost. The SlingPlayer software will thankfully be available this year for OS X and PocketPC devices. However, for a current Mac user it's frustrating to not be able to watch TV on my new iMac G5's crisp display. Also, there is a slight chance your cable box won't be compatible with Slingbox's IR controller. Slingbox has a few workarounds, but they may not work and thus you'll have to change your programming on your regular TV if you're sick of watching Animal Planet on your laptop. Otherwise, you won't find much else wrong with Slingbox and SlingPlayer.