The Slingbox

[O]

http://www.slingmedia.com/indexa.php

I travel a lot for my job and this device is just brilliant. It allows you to watch and control your home TV from anywhere in the world.
You take the S-Video out from your cable, satellite, receiver and connect it to the Slingbox. Then you connect The Slingbox to your internet route with an ethernet cable, line up the IR nodes with the receivers IR and voila, you can watch TV and control your receiver/DVR from your laptop as long as you have a broadband connection.
I was in a hotel ballroom in Orlando last Sunday and was able to watch the Cardinals game from my laptop live. I can watch recorded programs that I have saved to my DVR. I can program my DVR, etc.
It retails for two hundred bocks.
For those of you that travel I highly recommend this device.

 

[bratwurst]

I bought one of these through work last Wednesday, and it hasn't shown up yet. I was going to try it out this weekend by setting it up on my basement tv which never gets watched, and one of my coworkers was going to watch the green bay game via my Sunday Ticket subscription. Didn't arrive in time though.

I think there is a legitimate use for this at my workplace, but doing a mythtv setup might be better since I can have more than one streaming connection at a time using myth.

Pretty cool though, you can also watch if you have a windows mobile style phone and a good bandwidth connection like evdo. It will also completely control your tivo.

 

[Griffin]

As an alternative, if you have a PC with a tv card, you can do the same using free software from orb.com

 

[Ryanwb]

They now have the slingbox pro which you can now stream HD content

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=203138983&adid=17662

 

[bratwurst]

I just hooked mine up at work, pretty cool.

 

[bratwurst]

UPDATE on my slingbox.

SO I got the thing hooked up to my cable feed at work. It was really cool. I decide to take it home and hook it up to my tivo to see how it does controlling that.

First though, I updated the firmware and player, and bam, it stopped working. It will show the tv feed for about a second, in black and white, then a blue screen that says "no video feed detected". Even though it shows the video for a second!

I tried calling customer service, couldn't get through. I brought it home to work with it over the weekend, hook it up at home, same thing. I call customer service, they're closed on the weekends. I tried the slingbox community forum and realize a ton of people have been having this problem since September. There's a new revision of the software but you need to call customer service to get it. Again, its Saturday and they're closed.

So my big question here is - if the updated firmware and software are causing tons of problems, why don't you A) release the fixed software or B) pull the bad software?

 

[O]

I did all the updates and haven't had any problems.
I'm not using itwith a Tivo though, I have a Cox DVR.
I would try to delete and re-install everything.