Mini Review:  It works.  Got $300 burning a hole in your pocket?  Get it.

I just finished installing a TV in the kitchen and really did not feel like tearing up the walls to get a coax cable connection installed.   The TV is hooked to an old Mac Mini which we previously used with a monitor to view iTunes content, etc.   Now that it’s hooked to a proper HD LCD TV, it was crying out for some real live TV content.  Slingbox seemed like an obvious choice.

I looked all over the web for a definitive statement on Slingbox and FiOS TV compatibility before buying a SlingBox Pro HD at Frys the other day.  Arrgh.  Nothing but a confusing mass of conflicting and outdated information.

Of course, curiosity soon got the better of me and I bought one anyway.   It’s installed and running now and it all works pretty great.   Luckily for me Sling released a bunch of mac related updates right before Christmas.  Of course, finding out any of this from Sling’s really horrible support site was useless.

So, here you go:

  • FiOS TV boxes are fully supported and you get a near exact replica of the remote onscreen.  You use the remote to work the cable box just as you normally would.  You can watch recorded programs, schedule new ones and even buy and view on-demand titles with ease.
  • The onscreen program guide is accurate and lists all available channels.
  • The picture quality of the HD streaming really exceeded my expectations.
  • Setting up the router was a bit of a chore.   I could not get the port forwarding working on the default port  (5001) but changing it to another unused port solved the problem immediately.  I saw some references on the web that Verizon is blocking the port.   That seems unreasonable to me, but anyhow specifying  a different port fixed the problem right up.  Don’t bother trying to use the automated router setup with the current version of the software (This is as of 12/30/2009)
  • Mac OSX  HD Streaming is working through the SlingPlayer client on a local network.   It also works shockingly well through their web interface at http://watch.slingbox.com.   There is a beta version of the firefox plugin available that finally supports Snow Leopard.

This seems like an obvious feature, but the #1 missing feature seems to be an option to blank the local TV screen while content is being streamed.    Is it buried in there somewhere?

Let me know if anyone out there want’s more detailed info on the setup.  I’ll be happy to oblige.