Sling Media - SlingBox Pro - Watch Your Home Digital TV Anywhere! Control & Watch Up to 4 Sources

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Editorial reviews

Product Description
The Slingbox? PRO allows you to watch and control up to four video sources?including your HD content?from anywhere in the world on your laptop or cell phone. That means you can virtually take your entire home theater with you, including your DVR, digital cable, satellite receiver, and DVD player. With the Slingbox PRO, you?ll be at home wherever you roam. YOUR HOME THEATER AWAY FROM HOME The Slingbox PRO is the perfect companion for your home theater. With the ability to watch and control up to three standard definition and one high definition video devices, the Slingbox PRO ensures that you can watch all of your favorite home theater entertainment anywhere you go. Using an Internet connected computer or compatible mobile phone*, you can watch and control your home TV, DVR, basic cable, digital cable box, or satellite receiver anywhere around your home or around the globe. With a Slingbox PRO you will never be separated from your favorite TV shows, sports broadcasts, breaking news stories, digital video recordings, or video on demand. *Requires SlingPlayer Mobile Software, Sold Separately ULTIMATE CONNECTIVITY Connect and control up to four A/V sources. This means you can access your entire home theater, including digital cable, DVD players, TiVo, or any other new-fangled contraption you may have. HD READY The Slingbox PRO is HD Component video compatible (up to 1080i) when used with the optional Slingbox HD Connect Cable. The Slingbox and SlingStream technology adapts the compressed video stream to match the available network and Internet bandwidth. This provides the best possible video quality between the Slingbox and the SlingPlayer application, whether running on a computer or mobile phone. SLINGPLAYER Included with your Slingbox PRO is SlingPlayer, the software for your Mac or Windows PC that works with the hardware inside the Slingbox to make your TV viewing experience just like that at home. SlingPlayer Mobile* lets you watch and control your

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Customer reviews

review by: adrianandcaroline date: 2008-04-24 rating:
Great gadget and brilliant back up
I was quite nervous about buying a Slingbox but really wanted to keep in touch with our sport whilst abroad - particularly having missed the Rugby World Cup whilst in Kentucky and not being able to watch our horseracing.

I bought the Pro because I wanted to be able to watch either Sky or DVDs and be able to upscale to HD when I've bought a SkyHD package. Also I thought if I was going to all this trouble I wanted the best one!

I drilled a hole between my lounge and study (where my router is) and thread an ethernet cable through - hoping that this would give a better stream than wireless.

I also had to buy a router splitter box because my Netgear router only had one Ethernet port but this was cheap and obviously simple. I've now got 5 more ports for future gadgets!

I then just loaded the software and was up and running - able to watch my TV on the study computer and able to change channels as well.

I also loaded the software onto my laptop whilst at work. I did have some problems here but rang the free Slingbox helpline and the people were absolutely great. You allow them access to your computer over a weblink and they quickly reconfigured my netgear modem for me (to allow remote access) and now I'm up and running. I didn't need any tech knowledge - they did it all for me in a few minutes one evening - all for free.

This is a brilliant product and if you want to watch your TV on your travels I can recommend it.

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review by: Ray-Man date: 2008-04-06 rating:
Hurrah for the Underdog !!!
We've all been disappointed by the Big-Boy manafacturers, and sometimes even cheated (eg: I'll personally NEVER buy Phillips again!); so spending so much on a product by someone we've never heard of must be a worry.
Especially if the product looks so wierd!!! (I was never a fan of Space 1999).

However, buy with confidence.

Once you hold the product in real life, you'll love the style, it's a real 'designer' icon, and makes the glossy gadgets it'll stand alongside, look 15 years out of date.
Set up is very easy, but remember to push the Remote Control cable-jacks in fully (till you hear a little click).
I foolishly bought an American spec model on Ebay, and paid the price for trying to save money. But even then, the Customer Support were extremly polite (& that's a strong 'plus-point' in my opinion, it buys my loyalty).
So Amazon got my order for the 'real' McCoy.

I was watching my tv on my laptop, via my wireless router, within 15 to 20 minutes.
It's very user friendly, and you don't need any pc skills to set it up. You even control your input (eg: my Telewest/Virgin Media Cablebox), via an on-screen remote control that matches my 'real' remote control.

I've not worked out how to view my tv over the web yet, or how to view the built-in Freeview, which I believe it has, but I don't fear this. As soon as I want to look into that, I don't doubt it'll be a sinch.
(Although I've tried, and failed, to set up the Mobile Phone viewing on my O2 Orbit XDA Windows Mobile 5 mobile phone... maybe it's not compatible? I may need to ring them on that one).

Viewing full-screen on a 15" laptop is ok (not dvd quality, but I knew not to expect this), whereas when you reduce the screen size, it improves.
I've gone for the higher spec model, as I hope it will be a bit more future-proof, and therefore save me money in the long run.

I wish I was this happy every time I spent my money.

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review by: Chappie date: 2008-02-28 rating:
BEWARE if using Virgin Media
My slingbox arrived, I plugged it in, following all the instructions, and then..... Nothing!

Frantic calls to the Slingbox Helpdesk later, I found out that if you have a Virgin Media V+ box it DOES NOT WORK. Slingbox do not support this box at the moment and are working on drivers etc for it.

If it worked then I would have given it 5 Stars!!!!

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review by: date: 2007-12-17 rating:
Fantastic - Does exactly what it says on the tin
I wasn't sure about whether this would work. I need something allowing me to watch TV (namely Arsenal games!) while on the road. I travel all over the world and miss my telly, so this looked to be an ideal solution. A by-product of what it does is the ability for me to watch my Sk+ box elsewhere in the house. So far I have only tested this on my home network but if that is anything to go by then the remote connection shouldn't be too bad at all.

Set up was a breeze. As a Mac user I am used to having to suffer sub standard drivers/SW and for non Mac products to require a lot of mucking about with. Not so the Slingbox Pro. I literally had it up and running within 5 minutes of unboxing it. Installing it is a total breeze and then once you have allowed it to do the auto set up thing, it just seems to work. It's a long time since I have got something that does so perfectly what I would expect, and does it so quickly. A lot of big companies could do well to take a leaf out of Sling's book in terms of making powerful products easy to use. Even the packaging is well thought out.

The Mac version of the SW has so far shown to be well written and I've seen no hangs/crashes etc. either. Of course, you'll never see quality on a par with that of the TV attached to your Sky Box, but that's not what this is about and the quality is perfectly acceptable on my 24" imac in full screen mode. On the road I suspect I will be forced to readjust my viewing expectations, but if it's anything like what I am getting right now then I'll be more than happy.

The way the remote control works is fantastic and it just makes using this neat product even better. If I have to be picky I'd say that while the design is innovative, the box itself is pretty flimsy, especially on the rear bottom edge and personally a nice shiny black box rather than the red one would have looked cooler, however this is just personal taste. Some better LED feedback on what the box is doing would be nice too, but really I am scraping the bottom of the barrel when looking for bad points here.

All in all I'm well impressed with this little gizmo and have no hesitation in recommending it 100%.


review by: date: 2007-12-13 rating:
only 5* because there is no higher rating.
I have a friend in the US who likes to watch an English show, in the past I would go about a long an sometimes expensive way about converting things to get them the show. The best way I found of doing this until recently was to record to DVD, rip and upload. Then along came the Slingbox. I watched some videos on youtube and also watched some stuff on the Slingbox website (quite entertaining!) and so I took the plunge and bought one and I honestly have no idea how I got along without one. This is an amazing bit of kit. The video quality is very good even on a DSL connection. The fact that I do not have a static (i.e. non-changing) IP address from my ISP doesn't matter as the folks at Slingbox have worked around that by each box having a unique "FinderID" so my IP address could change 20 times a day and I would still be able to watch and control my Sky+ box or DVD-DVR. I would say that this does "exactly what it says on the tin" but to be honest if anything this piece of kit is far more remarkable. The windows and Mac clients are free, though only 1 device may view and control the Slingbox at any one time (no big deal). The mobile clients are $30 or £20 respectivly but you can download a 30 day trial to see how good they are and to be honest I would not hesitate to buy them as they "just work". It's a quality product that they have really thought about every aspect of, from the ridiculously simple installation to the ability to locate the box no matter your IP address. Worth every single penny, you will simply not believe how good this thing is.

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