Watch Your Television Almost Anywhere
Here at MacForce we are media lovers. Music, movies and television make up a nice chunk of our free time. And we use our Macs and iPods to manage most of it, but there’s always been a piece missing from our quest for media nirvana, and until the Slingbox arrived in our store, we didn’t even realize it.
The Slingbox (AV and Pro) allows you to “broadcast” and control your home’s cable box (analog or digital), ReplayTV, TiVo, Dish Network, DirecTV and DVD player over the Internet. If you’re in a hotel in Japan, at a friend’s house or just sitting out in your hot tub, the Slingbox allows you to control and view your media system remotely with a broadband connection.
Recently, I was able to share a skit from Saturday Night Live with my workmates. No need to purchase it off the iTunes Store, I just ran the SlingPlayer client software and over the Internet controlled and viewed the content of my living room’s TiVo. The Slingbox interface has a menu system that replicates the interface for your current remotes. With it, you can play, pause, fast forward, rewind, change the channel, record and program your AV system. The Slingbox is not a personal video recorder (PVR), but it should be able to control the one you currently own (Supported devices: us.slingmedia.com/object/KB-005101.html) at home. You can even control and view on some mobile phones. Imagine the fun of sharing your favorite sports highlights or catching a show while working an all-nighter.
How does it do this media magic? The Slingbox has multiple AV inputs, Ethernet, a universal infrared repeater and a very smart video digitizer. On the fly, it adjusts the video sent to you based on the bandwidth of your client computer’s Internet connection. Slingbox currently provides (for free) the SlingPlayer client software for Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Mobile and Pocket PC. The Mac version is currently in Beta and is available for download (link below).
The Slingbox has changed the way I manage my media, and allowed me to share and view it in ways I never thought possible. I no longer have to burn a copy of a show or transfer Gigs of content to my iPod. I can just log in remotely from work, a friend’s house or while traveling, and my living room’s video content is waiting for me.
Tags: Apple, DVD, Entertainment, Mac, Media, Slingbox, TV
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