Connecting a laptop to a television set is usually kind of a pain in the neck. However, the whole process has been made pretty simple by the Slingbox. If you’ve never heard of the Slingbox, it’s actually pretty cool. The Slingbox actually sends streaming footage from up to four audio/video sources directly into any laptop or PC with a broadband internet connection. The product is produced by the San Mateo, CA company Sling Media.
What this allows you to do is basically plug your cable or satellite directly into the Slingbox, and then watch television in another room in your house. The box connects not only to your laptop, but also on mobile devices, and anything else SlingPlayer software has been released on.
You can actually connect any audio/video input into the Slingbox. This means you could watch direct feed from a video camera or a video game console on your laptop or mobile device. Nobody really wants to play Playstation 3 on a two inch screen, but still, it’s a pretty neat function!
However, there are a few limits placed on the Slingbox. For example, only one user can access the stream at a time. You could feed your cable into a splitter and have one person watching it on television while another watches it via the internet, but only one internet user at a time is allowed to watch the media. This is in efforts to avoid copyright infringement. Basically, the fear is that people will stream things like pay per view movies and premium cable directly onto the internet for others to watch. It seems like an extreme measure, but with the makers of Bear Share and other peer to peer sharing sites and services being sued and shut down, you can’t really blame Sling Media for covering their bases.
Using mReplay, you can actually use Slingbox to record, control and edit the feed without any additional editing software. This can be helpful if you have home videos you want to get on the internet, or if you just want to record your favourite shows and skip the commercials. If you’re feeling more imaginative, you could even record a TV show and record goofy Kung Fu voices over all the characters (as long as it’s parody, it actually doesn’t count as copyright infringement).
But, if we can be completely honest for a moment, the real benefit to Slingbox should be obvious… As long as you have an internet-enabled laptop, you no longer have to wait for commercial breaks to use the bathroom.
Further reading:
- Laptop To TV: How To Make The Connection
- Laptop to TV
- Laptop to TV Connection Options
- Connecting Laptop to TV Without Getting a Headache
- Beginner’s guide on how to use Internet on a Laptop
Slingbox is very cool but annoyes my family at home when I change channels on them and upload speeds pretty crappy for my DSL so I started using http://parkmytv.com which is a ‘hosted tv’ service for place-shifting devices. I sent them my box and for $49/mo I now have super fast bandwidth ie. video quality, no channel conflicts and free reboots if it locks up. It’s a beta currently but accepting limited new customers, was lucky enough to get in and lovin it.