Slinging It

Yes it’s the political season and the candidates are sure slinging a lot of mud at each other as the campaigns draw towards the elections, but today I am also slinging and it has nothing to do with politics.

 On Friday my new Slingbox Pro HD unit arrived in the mail from Amazon.COM.

The Slingbox Pro HD is the latest Slingbox unit from Sling Media and is the first one that allows you to watch your HD content anywhere and as long as your internet connection is good enough you can also watch anywhere in full high definition on any PC. I honestly did not believe the clams of being able to watching in HD anywhere, but after a weekend of playing with this box, I am now a true believer.

I doubted the fact that the HD quality could look as good as watching HD at home and while the Slingbox Pro HD is not 100% perfect HD, the video quality most of the time is just like watching it at home.

At home I have internet service from Cox cable; I pay $44.99 a month for their Premier internet service which gives me 25 Mbps down and 3.5Mbps up.  The key to being able to watch HD remotely is having fast enough upload speeds.  The folks from Sling recommend an upload speed of 1.5Mbps in order to be able to stream HD video.

Today I have been sitting in my office watching live HD television from my home and the picture quality has been amazing.  Over the last hour I have been watching” Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” on HBO Family in HD from Dish Network. I picked this movie because of the vast colors that made up the magical toy store and I have been wowed with rich vivid colors and amazing picture quality.  According to the Slingplayer software my download speed has been 2475Kpbs and other then a small hiccup every now and then the playback has been flawless.

The most major flaw I have seen in the new Slingbox Pro HD is that it has a built in ATSC / NTSC / QAM tuner built in.  I plugged in my cable into it and scanned the channels, however instead of scanning both the regular analog cable channels and the unscrambled QAM digital channels I could only pick one.  So if I wanted to watch my HD locals which are available in unscrambled QAM I could, however if I wanted to watch VH-1 which is an analog channel I would have to go into the Slingbox setup and rescan the channels for the analog channels to come in (and then of course I would then lose all the digital channels)

Another flaw was when I was watching in QAM mode on the unscrambled QAM channels there was no guide data.  While I can understand why there is no guide data I did not find a way to rename channels.  For me it is hard to remember that 127.13 is my local NBC, I want to click on the channel and be able to name it so that I could easily find the channel in the future.

I believe that both of these problems should be easy to fix with just a software update.

Besides being able to watch HD content that was available to me with the built in QAM tuner, I also hooked up my Dish Network ViP 722 High Definition DVR and the new Slingbox Pro HD worked flawlessly with the receiver (as it should Sling Media is owned by Echostar the folks who make the Dish Network receivers.)

Another feature I would like to see is to be able to have more than 1 component HD input, but I know I am strange as not many people have more than 1 HD content provider available to them (I have a total of 3)

The things at Sling are going to get really interesting soon as Sling prepares to launch its new Sling.COM website, on this site users will be able to find all kinds of great content and more interestingly people will be able to watch their Slingbox units from home on any computer without needed to download or install special Sling software.

If you have satellite or cable and a good internet connection at home and would like to enjoy your HD television anywhere, you might want to check out the new Slingbox Pro HD. 

See its true… you don’t need to be a politician to start Slinging stuff.