Yesterday I had the opportunity to setup “Slingbox Pro” system and streamed TV over Cingular HSDPA network to a cellphone. Overall it is a awesome technology. And its quite fantastik!
What is a sling box?
To put in simply – it a device that will allow you to watch your TV (and other media) on any PC or may mobile devices (WinMobile & Palm)connected to the internet.
For more about slingbox … here
My comments:
I setup a slingbox pro and viewed/controlled TV remotely from a Cingular 8525 (WinMobile 5.0 Pocket PC device) over UMTS/HSDPA. Below are some comments I have.
Pros:
– Dynamic quality/rate control is very good. It adapts quite nicely to your network bandwidth.
– Sling player on desktop interface is quite simple and intuitive to use.
– Ships with adequate cables.
Cons:
– Setup is not very trivial. Atleast the home network router configuration to access it from WAN (home LAN setup is quite new).
– Audio video sync (lip sync) is quite bad.
– Slingplayer for pocket pc is not that mature (some features dont seem to be intutitve and working). We had to reboot the phone a couple of time.
– Slingplayer mobile is $29.99 more and had to be purchased seperately.
– Slingbox does not seem to support network multicast — which is quite ok.. as it depends on the number of tuners you have in your cable box.
TBD
– HD content access and streaming. We dont have a HD connect cable yet… so cant review.
– Slingturbo seems to be a obvious thing to buy if your cable box is quite far from your ethernet hub. We dont have one yet… check it out here