Rés of The Day

".. means that you have to put yourself in a very weak position. If you don't want to be in that position, then let everybody loves you but never do the same."

Labels: Keluh Kesah

If you ever checked my Friendster profile, you'd see on there one of my "Current Wishes" is Sling Media's Slingbox. I have fortunately managed to unleash my desire to own this amazing piece of technology, and had it in my hand since yesterday.

For you who has no idea what SlingBox is, basically, it lets you stream whatever signal that you would normally be able to enjoy on your TV only, to anywhere in the world as long as you're connected to a broadband internet connection. You can stream your antenna signal, cable, satellite, even your DVR (TiVo-kind of signal) and view whatever program, channel, or recorded shows you have in them through a very sophisticated Sling Media Player that you can install for free. For more information, CNet.com might be a good source to embark on understanding how I fell in love with this device for the first time.

I got this baby on Amazon.com. I ordered it last Friday with free 2-days shipping (courtesy of trial of Amazon Prime). Since the device doesn't have a wireless capability and my TV is in a room where then only internet connection available is through wireless, I had to get ethernet extension adapters that would let me relay my internet connection (from the router) through the electrical circuit in the house. Pretty neat idea actually (and honestly, I never thought it was possible). I got two pieces of Netgear XE102 Powerline Adapter, just some cheap stuff (which I was kind of worried if it won't work with the old electrical installation at my house). That was the first thing I did when I got the package yesterday, making sure that the adapter does work and the connection that I got through them is broadband-ish enough to stream real-time signal over the internet.

Everything turned out to be working fine. I then proceed to installing the SlingBox. It was quite simple, with so many alternative installation that you can choose based on how you watch TV at home. I have intended from the beginning to connect my TiVo to it, so that's what I did. After all the inputs (audio, video, infra-red, ethernet, power) are connected, I got a little trouble with the internet connection. The indicator doesn't stay on, which means the device couldn't connect to the internet. After a few trial and error, it turned out that the problem is with the supplied ethernet cable from SlingBox, which is very surprising to me. Fortunately I have a few extra ethrenet cables which did the work perfectly.

The next part was the software installation. It was pretty easy, needed to update the software before it was fully installed (the updater could be a little better though, instead of taking you to connect to the website it might be easier to have the wizard pops up automatically). Then it came to the set-up.

The set up was a little tough. I could get the signal from Sling Media player (from my computer), but when I tried to set up the remote control, it didn't provide the signal source that I'm using (Toshiba's DVR RS-TX20). I tried to use the closest match (or so I thought), but it didn't work. I searched on a forum, and I found out someone was using the remote code for TiVo Series 2. And since my Toshiba DVR is a TiVo Series 2, I thought I'd give it a try. And it worked! YAY! Not ideal, but it does its work fine.

Labels: Jurnal