#slingmedia

Best Way To See Your Home TV from the Road

Slingbox 350

Have you ever been away from home with your iPad or laptop and wished you could watch your home TV (your own cable channels or your TiVo / DVR recordings)?  Slingbox does this amazing thing and has no subscription cost. Just buy this unit for about $150, hook it to your favorite TiVo / DVR and you can see all the programming on your home TV from your laptop.  Add the $30 app from the Appstore and you can do the same from your iPhone / iPad.  Great for catching your local team from vacation or the show you missed last night while on your commute.  Obviously it works better over WiFi but its not too bad over 4G.  

This Slingbox sends out 1080 HD video which is more than you need - unless you plan to use it from a laptop or desktop at home to double your TV screens from the same Tivo - then HD comes in handy.  For use from the road, it provides a SD option which speedy up the signal.  

Get ready to amaze your friends when you can get Redzone during football season while everyone is watching the broadcast games. 

So this was strange - I was using my iPad (3rd Gen) as a "third screen" next to my computer this morning, watching the Chelsea v Norwich game via my SlingPlayer, and I noticed the video quality was obviously SQ (standard quality). My iPad is connected to my 5 GHz "N" wireless network so bandwidth wasn't the issue. 

I clicked the Quality button on the menu and found that the player was "locked" on the SQ mode - the Auto and HQ options were grayed out. I tried logging out of my account, disconnecting the network and reconnecting, but nothing worked. 

As a last resort I uninstalled SlingPlayer and then re-installed it from iTunes, and now it magically works as expected - a great HD picture even on my "G" speed wireless network.

I't's strange because there hasn't been an update to the iPad player since April and I use this at least once a week, and it's been working fine up until today. Not sure what caused the issue but glad it's gone :)

UPDATE: OK it gets weirder. I had changed my iPad wireless network to my 2.5 GHz  "G" network to see if that made a difference, and left it there when I re installed the SlingPlayer. Once it was working, I decided to switch the iPad back to the 5 GHz "N" network for the higher bandwidth. 

After changing the iPad to connect to the "N" network, the SlingPlayer went back to being "locked" on SQ. I left the iPad on the "N" network and then uninstalled/re installed SlingPlayer again, and now it's working properly in HQ. So it seems there's some problem with switching WiFi networks. 

Interestingly the SlingPlayer is reporting the same throughput (4032 kbps) on the "N" network as it does on the "G" network, so clearly it's capped (the browser-based SlingPlayer on my desktop PC, hooked directly to the router via Ethernet reports over 8000 kbps). 

Update #2: Apparently iOS6 broke this. See this thread on Sling's support board. Sling has turned off the feature, even though I'm using the iPad internally on my own network. The joys of computing in the cloud, where everything has to "phone home" before doing anything.