Slingbox??

Question

We are moving to Germany and would like to hook up a Slingbox Pro to my mother-in-law's digital cable and DVR, so that the kids can watch their Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Are they easy to install and hook up? How do they work? The box itself would have to be at her house, correct? Detailed answers, please...I am computer illiterate!!

Answer 1

Out of all the devices in the placeshifting market, the slingbox is by far the easiest to setup.

You must have a router at the house you want to put the slingbox in.  If you do not have a router, go out and buy one.

Once you have a router, you need to make sure there is a way to connect your router and slingbox together.  The slingbox must go where the cable TV wall jack is.  

If for example, your router is sitting in your basement and the TV wall jack is on the floor above, you will need to buy additional devices.  I suggest powerline instead of wireless.  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...  One of these devices plugs into the wall near your router, and then an ethernet goes from the powerline device to your router.  With the other adapter, it plugs into the wall near your slingbox, and then an ethernet cable connects the slingbox and that adapter together.  This uses your electrical wires to transmit data.  It is much simpler to setup than wireless.

Once you have the connections all setup, then you install the software on the computer.  It is pretty straight forward except for one thing.  You will need to enable port forwarding on your router.  Basically, you need to go into the interface of the router and enable port 5001.  The software can actually configure this for you automatically.  Otherwise, they should have clear instructions on how to do this manually, or call Sling Community's tech support.

The physical setup just involves connecting the IR blaster cable to the DVR and digital cable and hooking it to your router some how.  If the router is right next to the slingbox, use an ethernet cable.  If the router cannot be hooked up through an ethernet cable, go powerline instead of wireless.  Make sure you plug the power cord in last when it comes to the physical hookup.

The slingbox pro is great because it also has a TV tuner.  When you watch your standard cable stations, it will not conflict with anybody watching TV in the home.  When you watch digital cable, you will need to watch the same stations as the local TV viewer.

Just to warn you, the slingbox pro does not have a digital tuner.  There will be a different analog to digital conversion in 2012.  This time, it will be for cable instead of free over the air.  You might want to wait until the slingbox pro HD comes out.  This will have built in HD, and it will have a digital tuner.  Now if you don't need to have the regular channels because conflicting with the TV viewer isn't a problem, then don't worry about this transition in 2012.  This device should be coming out later this year.