Jon Greaves: Service Science, Gadgets and BBQ (not necessarily in that order...)

slingbox has been around for a while but i've held off getting one until yesterday. Now I wonder why I waited so long.

Yesterday I was looking for a way to get a video stream from my media hub into my home office. I had basically come to the conclusion that I needed to put in another directv box and use one of the video inputs of my monitor. Suboptimal since I wanted to be able to window the video and watch while doing other things.

Then I remembered slingbox, for some reason I had it in my mind there was no OSX support but just happened to check the website and found it has full OSX support. Next stop Bestbuy... I've picked up the AV version since I didn't need a tuner.

Setup was horrific, I think I finally tracked it down to the discovery protocol not liking the fact I have a cisco vpn client on the mac (even if its not active). I ended up booting up a windows xp instance under Parallels then was able to do the config.

The beauty of silngbox is just how simple it is. Just point a sling player at the IP address of the device (or use discovery if on the same lan segment) and your in business. It has an optimizing protocol for video quality

Performance has been excellent over the lan, for kicks I also tried with my family from england and they were able to watch full screen TV and control the remote etc. Very cool indeed. 

I wonder how hackable the slingbox is (next stop google), I can think of a few other services I'd like to see run from the slingbox, this could be fun!