Sling Box Review

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The Sling Box from Sling Media

What is a sling box?
The Sling Box is a device that lets you to watch your tv/movies/tivo/dvr away from home wherever you have an internet connection.

Basically, you hook your audio/video source to the sling box, hook the sling box to your network, and using the included software you can remotely view your source.

What do you get?
It comes in a radiant red box with a nice collection of cables.

In the box you get:
1 Sling Box 1 S-Video cable
1 coaxial cable
1 flat ethernet cable
2 composite (RCA) to 1/8" stereo cables
1 power adapter
1 Quick Setup manual
1 software cd

The unit is a very sleek silver. Red adorns the bottom and surrounds the inputs.

Most notably, there are Infra Red (IR) emitters included to act as a remote. This was the biggest selling point to me.
You can control your tivo, directv, dish, dvr, vcr, or almost ANYTHING for that matter.
One word of warning though: It doesn't support everything. I had to go through considerable trouble (2+ hours) to set it up for my Coolsat 4000 Pro. Gladly, with much persistence I did get it to work.

Sling Media could have included a "learning" feature so you can ease this huge pain in the ass.

You mount the 2 IR emitters on the front of your video source:

On the front of the unit there is a Sling Media logo. The N lights up when you connect to the sling box:

Connectivity

Inputs include: Coaxial, S-Video & Composite (via 1/8" stereo jack)
Outputs include: Ethernet (if that counts), S-Video & Composite (via 1/8" stereo jack)

Notice there is no coax ouput. This means a splitter is required to hook your cable/antenna to the sling box and TV/VCR. (This is clearly stated in the instructions)

Setup
Getting your sling box up and running takes only a few minutes.
The hardware setup is very simple, just plug everything in, and if the two green lights come on you're ready for the software

-Choose an audio/video source and plug it in
-Mount the IR transmitter on your source unit (satellite, cable box, dvd player, etc)
-plug the other end into the sling box
-Plug in the ethernet cable to your switch or router
-Plug in the power adapter