Monday, July 11, 2005
Very Remote Control
New Net tricks let you watch your home TV on your notebook PC or even your cell phone.
Stuck in a hotel room with hours of downtime? No need to abandon yourself to the lame entertainment on the inn's TV. Now you can open up your laptop and watch episodes of your favorite shows or innings of the home team streamed directly from your home digital video recorder via a high-speed Net connection. Just as the VCR developed and TiVo refined the concept of time-shifting TV, new Net-based products enable place-shifting--watching programs from a device that's somewhere you're not.
The $250 Slingbox from Sling Media can take TV from your living room and send it wherever you have a PC with a Net connection--bedroom, back yard or barnyard. You can connect the Slingbox directly to an antenna or cable feed and let it tune in analog channels, or attach it to a set-top box or DVR. Either way extra connectors keep the home TV hooked up, too. On any Net-enabled Windows XP machine SlingPlayer software will emulate your remote by controlling an IR blaster aimed at the box back home and then display the picture in its own frame on the PCscreen. Playback on mobile devices is promised soon.
On my notebook in a Wi-Fi cafe I could watch live TV and on-demand video from my DVR, as well as shows Ihad recorded on it earlier. I even programmed the DVRremotely to record a baseball game. This gives "remote control"new meaning: Now you can drive your spouse nuts by hogging the clicker from afar.
Unlike TiVo, Slingbox imposes no service fees. But though designed to be easy to install, the unit has several gotchas, the main one being that you have to wire it directly to your router. If that's impractical, as it is in my house, you'll need to spend $100 or so to link the router and the Slingbox via separate Wi-Fi or power-line alternatives that add complexity.
The first Slingbox I tried kept dropping the Net connection. Company executives spent hours helping me tinker fruitlessly with potential home networking problems before admitting what I'd suspected all along: The unit was defective. Moreover, the Windows software has lots of rough edges, the most obvious being its inability to change video brightness and contrast settings. The box does change channels quickly, though it takes a while to stabilize the image and audio synch. But even with lots of bandwidth the video tends to be soft and shimmery, and the audio can be warbly.
A different approach won't cost you a cent. Install Orb Media software from Orb Networks on a fast Windows XP machine with a built-in TV tuner and you can use it to stream showsnot just to other PCs but also to almost any device with a Web browser and Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Sounds unlikely, but I was able to watch a ball game on a Nokia cell phone and a Wi-Fi-enabled HP iPAQ. Image quality was just okay on the little devices, but on a laptop Orb's video generally looked and sounded better than the Slingbox's. Even for the majority of PC owners who don't have a TVcard, the surprisingly versatile Orb Media software lets you access just about any video, photo or unencrypted music file on your machine from just about anywhere.
But this, too, is a work in progress. Response to commands can take 15 seconds, which seems like an eternity when all you want to do is change the channel. Sometimes those commands end in a software crash on the home machine, though that can often be fixed remotely. The awkward Web interface needs a serious overhaul, particularly since it can leave you staring at a blank window and doesn't begin to reveal clever features like the ability to share photos with friends or set up TV recordings from your cell phone. And like the Slingbox, Orb works far better over a local network than remotely.
Orb Networks would like to sell you extra features like local weather reports, but if you're curious about place-shifting, Orb is a great way to try it without spending a dime. If you're thinking about a Slingbox, make sure you buy it with a money-back guarantee. TV it is, but prime time it is not.
Stephen Manes (steve@cranky.com)
Stuck in a hotel room with hours of downtime? No need to abandon yourself to the lame entertainment on the inn's TV. Now you can open up your laptop and watch episodes of your favorite shows or innings of the home team streamed directly from your home digital video recorder via a high-speed Net connection. Just as the VCR developed and TiVo refined the concept of time-shifting TV, new Net-based products enable place-shifting--watching programs from a device that's somewhere you're not.
The $250 Slingbox from Sling Media can take TV from your living room and send it wherever you have a PC with a Net connection--bedroom, back yard or barnyard. You can connect the Slingbox directly to an antenna or cable feed and let it tune in analog channels, or attach it to a set-top box or DVR. Either way extra connectors keep the home TV hooked up, too. On any Net-enabled Windows XP machine SlingPlayer software will emulate your remote by controlling an IR blaster aimed at the box back home and then display the picture in its own frame on the PCscreen. Playback on mobile devices is promised soon.
On my notebook in a Wi-Fi cafe I could watch live TV and on-demand video from my DVR, as well as shows Ihad recorded on it earlier. I even programmed the DVRremotely to record a baseball game. This gives "remote control"new meaning: Now you can drive your spouse nuts by hogging the clicker from afar.
Unlike TiVo, Slingbox imposes no service fees. But though designed to be easy to install, the unit has several gotchas, the main one being that you have to wire it directly to your router. If that's impractical, as it is in my house, you'll need to spend $100 or so to link the router and the Slingbox via separate Wi-Fi or power-line alternatives that add complexity.
The first Slingbox I tried kept dropping the Net connection. Company executives spent hours helping me tinker fruitlessly with potential home networking problems before admitting what I'd suspected all along: The unit was defective. Moreover, the Windows software has lots of rough edges, the most obvious being its inability to change video brightness and contrast settings. The box does change channels quickly, though it takes a while to stabilize the image and audio synch. But even with lots of bandwidth the video tends to be soft and shimmery, and the audio can be warbly.
A different approach won't cost you a cent. Install Orb Media software from Orb Networks on a fast Windows XP machine with a built-in TV tuner and you can use it to stream showsnot just to other PCs but also to almost any device with a Web browser and Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Sounds unlikely, but I was able to watch a ball game on a Nokia cell phone and a Wi-Fi-enabled HP iPAQ. Image quality was just okay on the little devices, but on a laptop Orb's video generally looked and sounded better than the Slingbox's. Even for the majority of PC owners who don't have a TVcard, the surprisingly versatile Orb Media software lets you access just about any video, photo or unencrypted music file on your machine from just about anywhere.
But this, too, is a work in progress. Response to commands can take 15 seconds, which seems like an eternity when all you want to do is change the channel. Sometimes those commands end in a software crash on the home machine, though that can often be fixed remotely. The awkward Web interface needs a serious overhaul, particularly since it can leave you staring at a blank window and doesn't begin to reveal clever features like the ability to share photos with friends or set up TV recordings from your cell phone. And like the Slingbox, Orb works far better over a local network than remotely.
Orb Networks would like to sell you extra features like local weather reports, but if you're curious about place-shifting, Orb is a great way to try it without spending a dime. If you're thinking about a Slingbox, make sure you buy it with a money-back guarantee. TV it is, but prime time it is not.
Stephen Manes (steve@cranky.com)
