The northlondonhippy

Archive for November 15th, 2007

Recently, I pur­chased a Sling­box Solo. I ordered it from Ama­zon and set it up a cou­ple of weeks ago.

For those of you who don’t know what a Sling­box is, please allow me to explain. A Sling­box is a device which you con­nect to your audio/video sources and to your home net­work and it allows you to place-shift your view­ing on a com­puter, in your home, or any­where in the world where you have an inter­net con­nec­tion and it also allows you to con­trol the source device.

I’ll elab­o­rate: I have a SKY+ satel­lite receiver and DVR (Dig­i­tal Video Recorder) in my liv­ing room, con­nected to my flatscreen TV. I’ve con­nected the Sling­box to the SKY+ and my net­work and the Sling­box takes the raw TV sig­nal and com­presses it, then streams it onto my home net­work, to be received by, say by my lap­top, wire­lessly in any other room in the house.

Are you get­ting the idea? In the­ory, I should be able to view my Sling­box out­side of my house, but I am hav­ing some port for­ward­ing issues which I’ve yet to resolve, because it goes through two dif­fer­ent routers before reach­ing the internet.

The Sling­box Solo is a very sim­ple look­ing device, with con­nec­tors on one side and some blinky lights on the other side. There are no but­tons or con­trols, the idea is to con­nect it, con­fig­ure it and for­get about it, every­thing else is done via the soft­ware you down­load, called SlingPlayer.

I con­nected my Sling­box Solo to my SKY+ via an S-video cable, as its the high­est qual­ity out­put sig­nal avail­able. My SKY+ is an orig­i­nal V1 Pace unit, feed­ing my TV via SCART, but the S-Video out­put mir­rors it. This means the Sling­box Solo only sees what­ever the SKY+ sees. If some­one is watch­ing the TV at the same time, you both have to watch the same programme.

I used a nor­mal RCA stereo phono cable to con­nect up the audio from the SKY+ to the Slin­box Solo and con­nected the power sup­ply. I also put the IR blasters above and below the SKY+ IR receiver as these pro­vide the remote con­trol functionality.

Finally, I had to con­nect the Sling­Box to my net­work. The Sling­Box only out­puts eth­er­net, there is no built in wi-fi, which is fine if your router is next to your tele­vi­sion. Mine isn’t, which meant using some sort of bridge.

My first try was an Air­port Express from Apple. They are nor­mally very robust and depend­able units and this was a cost effec­tive way to do it, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know why.

I con­nected the AE to my net­work in WDS mode, con­nected the Sling­box Solo to it and within a minute, the Sling­box was con­nected to my net­work. I was able to con­fig­ure the Sling­box quickly and was watch­ing my SKY+ on all my Macs in fairly good quality.

It didn’t last, the band­with dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and at least once a day, the Sling­box would lose its net­work con­nec­tion, though it appeared the Air­port Express was still con­nected to my net­work. I had other net­work prob­lems as well, los­ing con­nec­tions to my dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and other Air­port Express units, used for music stream­ing, were hav­ing dropouts too. Reset­ting the Sling­box and asso­ci­ated AE unit restored my con­nec­tion and got the net­work work­ing again, but the same prob­lem hap­pened every day.

When I dis­con­nected the Sling­box and AE, my net­work per­formed fine, so I decided to con­nect the Sling­box another way.

I bought a set of Net­Gear Home­Plugs, which do eth­er­net over pow­er­lines and they are a total rev­e­la­tion. You plug them both into the elec­tri­cal mains and they find each other auto­mat­i­cally and cre­ate a durable and robust eth­er­net bridge between the two loca­tions. Once plug is con­nected to my Air­port Extreme, the other is con­nected to the Sling­box. Within sec­onds, they were con­nected and so was the Sling­box and its held the con­nec­tion con­tin­u­ously since I con­nected them. These things are very cool!

I’m still hav­ing slight prob­lems with my net­work; it grinds to a halt and loses the inter­net about once a day, but then comes back. I think I need to set it all up again, as my base unit is still look­ing for an AE in WDS mode and its not there any­more. When I have the time, I’ll reboot all the units and reset them up from scratch. That’s how it was before the Sling­box, so it should go back to being per­fect again.

I’m also deter­mined to sort out the port for­ward­ing, as it would be cool to watch SKY+ from out­side my home, either live TV or recorded pro­grammes. The Sling­Player soft­ware includes a vir­tual remote for the SKY+, which means you can dupli­cate any remote com­mand with a sim­ple click of your mouse. Very clever!

There are other mod­els of Sling­Box avail­able, some offer­ing more con­nec­tions for more devices, oth­ers offer­ing dig­i­tal and ana­logue TV tuners. For my needs, with one main TV source, the Solo was per­fect. I’ve got shitty free­view recep­tion here, so a tuner was point­less and there’s no need to con­nect it to a DVD player, because most com­put­ers are already DVD players!

If I wanted to watch SKY in another room, I could have a sec­ond box installed, which I would have to pay for and I would be charged a ten­ner a month for the priv­i­lege. It wouldn’t be con­nected to my main SKY+, which means it would only receive live tv. Also, it would be in one fixed loca­tion, like my bed­room. What if I wanted to keep an eye on the news, while cook­ing dinner?

The Sling­box is a cheaper, more flex­i­ble solu­tion, it offers great pic­ture qual­ity, at full screen res­o­lu­tions, any­where inside my home. When I can view it over the inter­net, which I am cer­tain I will do one day soon, it will com­plete the pack­age. It’s a wel­come addi­tion to my A/V arsenal!

Thank you for drop­ping by tech-geek corner!

I know, I know. I haven’t been here in a fair few days.

No excuses, except for my catch all; “I’m rub­bish”. Fur­ther expla­na­tions will not be offered.

I’ve squan­dered a fair bit of time this week, being a bit of a tech-geek, sort­ing out some things around the house. One of those things was my Sling­box, which is now reli­ably work­ing on my home net­work, but I still haven’t sorted view­ing out­side of the house. More on this later.

I’ve also had a bit of a play around with Logic Stu­dio, or rather the bits of it that I have installed. I still haven’t received my replace­ment instal­la­tion DVD, so much of the included extra con­tent is out of my reach. Today’s post hasn’t come yet, so there’s still a chance it might arrive before the day is out.

Add to that the nor­mal bull­shit I have to do every day and you’ll see that I’m pretty busy most days.

I did get to screen an excel­lent film yes­ter­day, “Amer­i­can Gang­ster” and I can highly rec­om­mend it. It’s the story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem based busi­ness­man, who’s busi­ness was heroin impor­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Lucas basi­cally re-invented the heroin trade in the late 60s/early 70s in a very inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative way. He was also quite bru­tal, but only out of necessity.

If Lucas had used his con­sid­er­able intel­li­gence and busi­ness skill in any other indus­try, he would prob­a­bly be star­ring as the boss on the TV show, The Appren­tice, as he was truly an entre­pre­neur, but he didn’t. He chose heroin and the film does not shy away from show­ing the harm that smack does to its users, but it also makes the point that the anti-drug stance is almost as big an indus­try as the drugs trade and if black mar­ket trade in ille­gal drugs went away, so would the asso­ci­ated law enforce­ment and other ancil­liary businesses.

The film tells a com­plex story in many shades of grey and cer­tainly you will admire a lot about Lucas, though his bru­tal out­bursts never let you for­get the path he chose. It opens here in the UK tomor­row, if you get the chance, it’s worth seeing.

It comes back to some­thing I’ve said on here more than once, that the world wide black mar­ket in drugs is cap­i­tal­ism at its most basic; sim­ple sup­ply and demand. There is a huge, never-ending demand for sub­stances which alter your con­scious­ness, always has been, always will be. Cig­a­rettes and alco­hol, the legal drugs, just don’t cut it for some peo­ple and where legit­i­mate sources don’t deliver, ille­gal sup­ply lines will emerge. As long as peo­ple want some­thing, some­one will be there, ready to pro­vide it. This is about as basic a tru­ism as you can find about capitalism.

Our econ­omy and polit­i­cal sys­tem is build upon the foun­da­tions of cap­i­tal­ism, yet when it comes to the issue of ille­gal drugs, we are in deep, orches­trated denial. Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work and if I can site the usual exam­ple of when Amer­ica banned liquor, the result was an organ­ised crime struc­ture that still exists today. Peo­ple wanted booze; peo­ple got booze. They’ll realised then, you couldn’t stop free trade, so they opened the doors to a reg­u­lated, taxed and legal system.

If heroin were legal, Frank Lucas would have been on the cover of busi­ness mag­a­zines as a hero and leg­end, in almost the same way that Star­bucks rein­vented cof­fee. He also prob­a­bly wouldn’t have shot all those peo­ple in the head. It’s some­thing to think about. Well, for me anyway.