Sling box anyone?

arty

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Apr 5, 2009
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I have the possibility of moving to china for 3years and have been looking at the options of access to British tv when I am there.

has anyone had any success with streaming type devices such ad a sling box? I am interested in the upload and down load requirements for the system to work smoothly.
 

daveh75

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I would forget about trying to live stream/rebroadcast over the net, the results of on-the-fly transcoding/compression down to the level of your typical ADSL upstream bandwidth just aren't worth the effort.

You would be better off subscribing to a decent VPN/Proxy/DNS routing service* and use Catchup/VOD services to get your fix of British TV

*There are free services, but they're often unreliable with poor latency etc and make streaming a PITA.
 

arty

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Thanks for the reply.

I was afraid that might be the answer. I had hoped that with an upload speed of 20meg then things might be possible.

as you can imagine it is not high on my priorities but thought I'd do a little research before diving straight in. Does anyone have any experience of the type of services that daveh75 mentions?
 

Chisy1

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I am no expert but daveh75 did say "typical ADSL" upstream speed, which in my experience is less than 1meg. I have no direct experience but I would have thought an upload speed of 20meg (you must be on fibre) would more than suffice. I only have 5meg download and can stream HD video perfectly well.

If I were you I would keep investigating the possibility
 

Douglas9

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I used sling box for several years to send British TV to my daughter in France. Sling box recommend an upload speed of at least 256kbps and my speed of 370kbps gave pictures only reasonable for news and drama but not much use for fast moving sport like football and tennis. However things improved significantly when my upload speed was increased to about 1mbps and I would have thought 20 Mbps would have been OK.
 

jjbomber

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I've used one for the last 3 years. It is connected to my Sky+ multiroom. My friend in California watches all the rugby on it. Picture is very good and he controls the remote from over there. I have watched it in Dubai with no problems at all. I stream at 30Meg here and watched it at 5Meg in Dubai. No buffering at all. I would definately get one if you are to connect to something decent over here.

The fun part is the set up. You have to phone one of their engineers, who tunes the box to your router. I spoke to a Dutch guy in Germany. He gave me the choice of the technical way or the easy way. I chose the easy way. ''OK'', he said, ''I need you to put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea. Is that what you British say, a nice cup of tea?''. I replied that I prefer coffe. ''Well a cup of coffee and a biscuit'' he said. So I had a coffee and biscuit while he configured everything and that was it. All I had to do was enter the make of Sky box and create a password.
 

arty

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I am on fibre with 80 down and 20 up :)

Thanks for the follow up comments. Looks like it could be back on, subject to a decent download speed and usage allowance in china
 

Gyp

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I've been hosting one for a mate that lives in the US for a number of years, initially with the "classic" and lately with their freesat recorder.

Quality at the other end (I'm on Infinity) is excellent apparently and whilst not quite broadcast quality, he's more than happy.

I'd definitely recommend one, however will caveat that by saying that their support for older boxes isn't great - despite the freesat box still appearing to be a current product (http://www.echostar-europe.com/products/ConnectedDevices/Satellite/HDS600.aspx) their ipad and Android tablet apps don't support it and their phone app support is poor.

Having binned the windows programme that worked well with them in favour of a browser viewer that doesn't, I'd certainly suggest that if you do get one you seek out either the Pro-HD or one of the soon to be released boxes.

For those in different time zones, it's a real shame that the combined slingbox & pvr capability is no longer suppoted
 

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