Slingbox Solo

This product is fantastic for watching your favorite TV channels or DRV recordings when on vacations and business trips away from home. I use the Slingbox with my satellite DVR and it works surprisingly well in a small video window on my Mac notebook. As expected the video quality is very dependent on the available bandwidth. I have about a 3mbps upload speed at home, so I've gotten pretty decent video quality when I had a 1mbps download speed when in a hotel. I've also heard a story from a friend that he was able to watch a football game on his notebook on a flight that offered WiFi. That's pretty cool!

I am a gadget person so I'm surprised I had not heard more about Slingbox. My sister and step-son had one but I didn't really know much about it. I bought this product mainly to have the option to watch TV on my iPhone. Great results. I have a FloTv but that has limited stations and range. Now I can watch anywhere there is 3G service on my phone. I also purchased the SlingLink because my router is in another room. I am very happy with my purchase.

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I picked up a Slingbox Solo to do a test run before my bro moved to Germany. It sounded so complicated and above my technological abilities. However, got it home; plugged it in; hooked it to my wireless router...figured out a dumb glitch on my part and wham-o! we have our TV on the internet. You do have to have close access to high speed internet (Slingbox recommend 600 kbps anything lower than that comes through grainy and somewhat blurry; I still have about 110 kbps which is way below their recommendation and it comes through just not the best picture quality. We will be working on upgrading our internet speed). I just plugged it onto the back of my wireless router and it doesn't interrupt internet service in my house. I also chose to hook this up to my DVR rather than my basic satellite because it was closer to my internet router. The TV that is "slung" will actually be controlled by whoever is watching on the internet though. So unless you can figure out how to change that try to give access to a lesser used TV set. Also, I made the mistake of plugging my Slingbox into the back of my DVR to TV2 not TV1. Something that I didn't even realize the problem with that is that to get remote control on what you are watching on the internet, you have to have IR (or infared) connection (the slingbox comes with a wire that you plug on one end into the Slingbox and attach the other to top and bottom of the DVR/satellite box pointing to the place that receives the remote control signal. The wire from the Slingbox has infared bulbs just like a remote control has just follow the simple Slingbox instructions. I am making it sound way more complicated than it is). Simple enough because the remote for the TV farthest away from the DVR in my house runs on radio frequency rather than infared (IR). Slingbox chat support online helped me get that resolved very helpful and free. Once I got that figured out, I just switched the plug ins from TV2 to TV1. The owner's manual for my DVR helped me figured out which TV was on RF (Radio frequency) and which was one IR (Infared).

I highly recommend the Slingbox. The instructions are super simple and easy and if you run into any trouble within 90 days of buying the Slingbox, just get online and do chat support. Final note I bought this one at Best Buy and was thinking about getting their technical support to hook it up. DON'T DO THAT! It's way better to slog through it for a few hours and get it figured out on your own. Now if I have any problems with it in the future, I most likely will know what to do.

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I'm glad I have this product since I'm on the road so often and my dvr fills up if I don't watch my recordings. Its also been good for out-of-town family who want to watch the local football games that they can't get in other states. I just give them the slingbox IP and password.

But connecting from hotels can be problematic. Help centers at hotels and Slingbox are not usually helpful. I've had to change hotels if the firewalls prevent successful connection from my wireless laptop.

If there's a power outage at home, I have to wait to reset and reconfigure the box when I get home. 95% of the time, I can get a connection from a good hotel like a Marriott. The quality is not very good on my laptop, but acceptable

I also had to purchase a $100 ethernet wireless bridge since my dvr cable box is in a different room from my cable company's internet router. But I also use the bridge for connecting my netflix-capable blue-ray player now.

Follow up... My Solo died this week after 1 1/2 years of use. Warranty only lasts a year. I'll probably go ahead and buy an HD upgrade since I'm already invested in the ethernet bridge, and I still travel a lot.

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I've had the Slingbox SOLO for about two years now. It bought it so I could watch cable TV on the train to and from work on my iPhone (an additional $30 for the app).

After several months, it started disconnecting after a few seconds every time. Obviously it was impossible to watch anything at that point. I'm very tech savvy and tried to troubleshoot myself but to no avail.

I finally reached out to tech support and they wanted to charge me $30 to talk. The CSR claims that if I didn't want to pay, I could just go to their forums and FAQs to look up the error code and troubleshoot more on my own. He continued to say that he would be simply walking me through the same content anyway. Since I've already tried everything on there, I asked if I would get a refund if he was unsuccessful and he said no.

Anyway, there's no way I could justify paying $30 for a guy to walk me through the same troubleshooting steps that I've already tried repeatedly on their website. I'd prefer if he actually spent the 10 minutes to give me helpful advice instead of trying to get my credit card number. He was not pleasant to talk to, either.

Why can't a company like this stand behind its product? It seems so simple: help people fix their problems or replace defective units and they'd have a customer and free marketer for life. I used to show off my Slingbox but these days, I'm just embarrassed that I even have it. Between the Slingbox unit, the wireless adapter, and the iPhone app, I'm now stuck with a $300 piece of junk that allows me to watch about 10 seconds of TV.