IN DEPTH REVIEW: Slingbox PRO

Like TiVo, Slingbox is one of those amazing video products that Americans have enjoyed for years but has never officially made it to Australia until now. Just as TiVo saw time-shifting become mainstream, Slingbox delivers place-shifting to the masses - making it easy to stream video around your house or around the world. As with TiVo, it's also fair to ask whether Slingbox has arrived too late on the Australian scene to be relevant.

Four Slingbox products are available in Australia, the Slingbox SOLO ($349), Slingbox PRO ($449), SlingCatcher ($549) and SlingLink TURBO 4 port ($399 - available in August 2009). SlingPlayer software is also available for Windows, Mac and various smartphones (Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod touch).

The Slingbox SOLO and PRO are designed to live in your lounge room, connected to your AV devices such as a Foxtel iQ2 or TiVo personal video recorder. The PRO (pictured below) lets you connect three devices - via composite, s-video, component or SCART (the last two via the supplied adaptor) - while the SOLO only lets you connect one device. The PRO also features an analogue/digital TV tuner and you can pause and rewind live broadcasts or video from attached devices. There's also support for an electronic program guide, although it's disabled in Australia.



The SOLO and PRO are "HD compatible", a phrase that should instantly ring alarm bells with videophiles. Both devices support up to 1080i inputs, but then downscale content to 640x480 before streaming it. So in other words, your glorious high-def content is compressed to less than DVD quality before it even sets off across your network. At the other end, the SlingCatcher can upscale it to your required resolution, outputed via HDMI, component, composite, s-video or SCART. Meanwhile the Slingbox PRO-HD streams at 720p and 1080i - it went on sale in the US last year but there's no sign of the PRO-HD in Australia.

Both the SOLO and PRO feature pass-through outputs, so you can run your PVR into the Slingbox and then out to your television. You could also connect your PVR to your TV via HDMI and the Slingbox via another output, assuming your PVR is able to send video via multiple outputs simultaneously.

The Slingboxes feature an Ethernet port, allowing them to stream video from your PVR to other devices such as a SlingCatcher set top box plugged into a television in another room. Don't fret if you don't have Ethernet running to the television in the spare room, as the SlingLink TURBO 4 port lets you run an Ethernet network over your home's electrical wiring. The SlingCatcher comes with a universal remote (pictured left), which gives you full control over the SlingCatcher, the Slingbox PRO's onboard TV tuner and the devices connected to the Slingbox. The SlingCatcher relays commands from the remote to the Slingbox PRO, which then uses tiny infrared transmitters to control your attached devices.

The icing on the Slingbox cake is that it can also stream video to devices running SlingPlayer software, either via your local network or across the internet. So you could be sitting a hotel room on the other side of the world, happily watching a recording or live Australian TV streamed straight from your lounge room.

There are a myriad of ways to stream video these days, but the Slingbox's strength is its impressive ability to optimise video according to the available bandwidth. The Slingbox PRO offers a theoretical maximum of 8 Mbps when streaming, and we saw it surpass 5 Mbps on our local network when streaming fast-moving Top Gear scenes from our TiVo to a SlingCatcher connected to the same router. Unfortunately even in these optimum conditions it's not hard to distinguish the streaming video from the component video running straight from the TiVo to our television. Downscaling to 640x480 and then upscaling again means the picture isn't as crisp, plus the motion isn't as smooth and there a few jagged lines - basically what you'd get from a good, but not great, DivX file. It is still very watchable, with no audio or video jitter, and once you become engrossed in the content it's easy to forget you're watching streaming video. Streaming to a Mac or PC, connected to the local network and running the SlingPlayer software, also produced decent results.

It should be noted that we were testing the Slingbox gear with a 46 inch 1080p Sony Bravia, which is going to show up any imperfections on the picture. Later we hooked up the SlingCatcher to a 14 inch portable television, via composite video, and the results were all but indistinguishable from the original content when sitting a few metres away.

At the other end of the scale, the SlingBox PRO happily streamed Top Gear at 300 Kbps per second out over our DSL connection and then down to a notebook connected to the Vodafone mobile broadband network. Obviously the picture wasn't nearly as sharp as over the local network, coming in at 320x240 QVGA, but it was still very watchable for online video with no jitter in the audio or video.

The Slingbox gear has a few other tricks to offer, such as the SlingCatcher's (pictured left) ability to play a wide range of formats from an attached USB device, including Windows Media Video 7/8/9, MPEG-2 (including .ts and .vob) and MPEG-4 (including DivX and AVC H.264). SlingProjector for Windows software also lets you stream video straight from a PC to your SlingCatcher, including online video services such as YouTube and Hulu - although you'll need to run a VPN on your PC if you want to access US-only content.

The SlingBox PRO and SlingCatcher come with excellent instructions but can still be time consuming to set up, especially if you need to manually configure port forwarding on your router (at which point the instructions become considerably less helpful). Once configured, the Slingbox is one of those rare products that "just works" and we had no problem accessing our TiVo via the SlingCatcher and SlingPlayer running on Mac and Windows via the local network and the web.

Apart from the lack of HD streaming, the Slingbox PRO's only major disappointment is the built-in TV tuner - it's very flaky and refused to display most channels even though it found them all during the initial setup scan. The picture is terrible as, for some reason, the Slingbox insists on downscaling it to 320x240 QVGA even over a fast local network. Even on the 14 inch portable television it is painfully obvious that you're watching streaming video, as it looks far worse than the TiVo's output streaming at 320x240 over mobile broadband.

So what's the verdict? If you live alone and travel regularly, the Slingbox system would make a brilliant addition to your lounge room - letting you access your PVR and content from your PC from any computer or television around the house, as well as while you're on the road (assuming you've got a generous monthly mobile data allowance). If you share your lounge room with others, the Slingbox's value proposition starts to falter.

The Slingbox isn't very family-friendly for two key reasons; you can only access a Slingbox from one device at a time and, while you're accessing it, anyone else trying to watch the PVR is forced to watch whatever you're watching - unless you get in a remote control war. It's a war you'd lose, because the person in the lounge room would probably just yank the IR transmitters away from the PVR. This of course is a less than perfect situation if you want to watch the footy in the lounge room while the kids want to watch cartoons in the rumpus room, or if you want to watch NCIS from a hotel room while your Other Half is trying to watch Desperate Housewives at home. A Slingbox won't even grant two remote viewers simultaneous access to watch the same show. The ensuing conflict would certainly put a serious dint in your WAF.

The Slingbox PRO's disappointing built-in tuner could be the final straw for some people, as it's unbearable to watch on a television. Your only other options when sitting in front your rumpus room television are to watch the 640x480 live TV streamed directly from your PVR (which might be interrupting someone else's viewing on your lounge room television), or to plug a digital TV receiver directly into your rumpus room television. At this point you might be better off abandoning the Slingbox and just installing a TiVo or Beyonwiz PVR alongside each television - as both will offer sharper resolutions for local content and have the ability to stream recordings from the lounge room to the rumpus room without interrupting the content screening in the lounge room.

There are plenty of other home network configurations that would also replicate much of the Slingbox's features whilst maintaining the autonomy of other viewers around the house. For example you could run a media centre and/or DLNA server like TVersity in the lounge room and then access it from multiple clients around the house such as media extenders, network media players, games consoles and computers - with a higher resolution than 640x480. Slingbox's internet streaming features could be replicated by TVersity or services such as Orb.
 
A few years ago the Slingbox was an amazingly simple way to achieve feats that were otherwise very complicated, but now other services and devices can achieve similar results without compromising on resolution or handing over complete control of your lounge room to one person. The Slingbox is admittedly a more elegant and perhaps reliable solution than cobbling together a DLNA server and handful of media players, particularly if your want to access content from a smartphone while on the road. Even so, all that elegance and reliability will go unappreciated if you're constantly fighting with other members of your household for control of your PVR.

The Slingbox PRO's disappointing TV tuner and lack of EPG would also seriously compromise the Slingbox value proposition if it still forced you to place a digital TV tuner and aerial socket alongside each television in the house. If your second television is a high-def panel, you might want to wait to see if the Slingbox PRO-HD is released locally.

The Slingbox system is basically an elegant solution looking for a problem. If it solves your problems, you'll love it, but these days there are plenty of other streaming video options which might better suit your needs.