Take your TV's remote on the road
Did you miss your TiVo while you were on vacation? Were you stuck with basic or (gasp) no cable TV at that summer rental?
If you're used to having premium channels, zipping past commercials, pausing live TV, or easily recording programs with the click of a remote button, watching ''regular" TV can be a drag. Sling Media's Slingbox ($249) is aiming to change that by letting you take your home TV viewing experience on the road.
Slingbox sits between your TV, cable or satellite box, or a digital video recorder such as a TiVo and your home computer network. That allows you to watch -- and control -- your home TV and video equipment from a computer anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere that you have broadband Internet access and a computer running a recent version of Windows and Slingmedia's ''Slingplayer" software.
You can watch either live or recorded TV shows (if you have a digital video recorder) or even view a signal from a connected video camera.
Most consumers are used to ''time-shifting," thanks to the VCR, digital video recorders, and other devices that let you record programs for later viewing. With Slingbox, Sling Media joins a handful of other companies promoting the concept of ''place-shifting," or accessing your home media from anywhere. Other players in this space include Orb, a free, software-only product, and Sony's LocationFree TV.
I recently tested a Slingbox, hooking it up to my DirecTV TiVo. Although the included Quick Start Guide says it takes ''four simple steps" to set up a Slingbox, it can be quite a bit more complicated, depending on a number of factors, including how your home network is configured.
The device comes with a mess of cables meant to cover multiple setup options: an S-video cable, two A/V cables, an infrared control cable, an ethernet cable, and a coaxial cable. The box also includes a power adapter and a setup CD-ROM, which installs the Slingplayer software that displays your video, and an on-screen remote that allows you to change the channel just as if you were sitting in your living room.
Because the Slingbox needs to be connected to your network's router via an ethernet cable, your first hurdle will be figuring out what to do if there's no router or ethernet port in the room where you're connecting the Slingbox to the TV.
The company recommends that you purchase two wall plug bridges (a.k.a. Homeplug or Powerline ethernet adapters), devices that work through your home's electrical wiring, essentially turning every power outlet into a network connection. Or, you could set up a wireless bridge.
After connecting S-video and audio cables from the Slingbox to the TiVo, I had to carefully position emitters near the infrared sensor on the front of the TiVo so that Slingbox could control it.
The final step is to run the Slingbox Setup Wizard and install the Slingplayer software. Since I have a ''Universal Plug and Play" (UPnP) network router, the Setup Wizard automatically configured everything.
Good thing, because the instructions for manually setting up a router made me want to run for cover. The company also warns that it's not uncommon to find multiple routers in households these days that you may not even know are there.
For instance, some DSL, cable modems, and Internet phone call devices have router functionality. If you do have multiple routers, Slingbox needs to be connected to the ''primary" router.
Luckily, it only took about 30 minutes to set up the Slingbox; most of that time was spent studying the documentation. However, the results were amazingly good, and the box worked as advertised.
Watching from my home office on a desktop computer connected to the network via Ethernet was close to watching the real thing. Picture quality was very good. Not so for watching wirelessly via a laptop. Even though the Slingbox and Slingplayer software use proprietary technology that monitors and adjusts the video stream on the fly, the picture was only slightly better than a typical Web stream.
That's no surprise, since picture quality can be affected by things like the speed of your Internet connection or quality of your monitor.
I was impressed that the Slingplayer interface displayed a reasonable facsimile of the ''real" remote that I use to control my TiVo. In no time I was pausing live TV, watching recorded shows, and fast-forwarding through commercials.
But be forewarned: If you live with a remote hog you may want to keep 'em off of Slingbox; otherwise, he'll be able to change the channels on you, even when not in the room.
Michelle Johnson is a freelance writer. She can be reached at mijohn@mail-me.com. 
