Slingbox
 

Is anyone using a Slingbox? I'm looking at getting up setup on the father-in-laws Sky+HD box in the UK so we can watch Britsh TV once we move.

Re: Slingbox
 

Its a good idea, the only downside is that most internet companies have restrictive download quotas, so you will need a pretty expensive package. One of the best is the iinet one with a 200gb quota thats the biggest I have ever seen here and has only just be brought out in the last month or so, not sure if its availiable everywhere though

Re: Slingbox
 

I've got one, but didn't hook it up before we moved as we cancelled our Sky & neither of the parents have it. I do watch a lot of iPlayer here in Australia though, done via a vpn account, uses about 700Mb/h but I have 400Gb/month so so issues.

Re: Slingbox
 

I'm not sure that 200GB plans are the biggest or that new. TPG do unlimited for $59.99 or $29.99 if you bundle a home phone line: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_servi...cing/adsl2plus

Even IINet now do a Terrabyte plan (1000GB) for $99.95 if you bundle a home phone line: http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html

Re: Slingbox
 

I'd suggest VPN is the way to go as well, as your not just restricted to Sky.... I would love to try a Slingbox out though. My father has Sky so I could hook into his account. Can you get most programs on Sky via the net "on demand" as catch up ?

BTW Freebo which VPN provider are you using. Every free trial I've used stutters and pauses. Are you definitely having no issue with yours ?

TPG now do unlimited accounts for 59 bucks per month... AAPT are close to unlimited as well at 1.1 Terrabytes. IInet have a 1 TB account as well. The other ISP's have to eventually follow.

I'm on the IInet naked 400 gb plan at 89 bucks per month.

Re: Slingbox
 

I've been using (paid) hideipvpn for 3 months at $6 per month its much better value than my foxtel. Definitely have no issues with it, I run a proxy server (squid) on my Mac (well on my NAS now) and point my PS3 at it to play iplayer.

I watch all the F1 races on it at 3 hours a time, the apprentice etc - never had a connection problem and extremely rare pauses in playback, I'd say once every 8 hours of viewing, it does take a couple of mins to buffer & start playback. I did a speed test and am getting about 2mbps from it.

Re: Slingbox
 

Yehp I'm going to try and make the leap.... There will be a lot of whinging in this household when I do though. So I have to make the whole thing use friendly... hence I have to go down the remote controlled acer revo path I reckon.

I'll give Hideipvpn a go....

Hmm my plan was to cancel Foxtel... Did you hang on to yours ?

Re: Slingbox
 

I'm still in my contract period on foxtel but will scale the packages way down as early as poss.

I'm not familiar with the revo but the PS3 solution works OK and is fully remote controlled (via a logitech harmony one remote).

My view on hideipvpn was it was worth $6 to give it a go for the month, I didn't choose the automatic paypal sub & pay manually every month. Get it working on your PC first to test (for firefox foxyproxy is great for this, I use Chrome and Proxy Switchy).

HTH if you have any issues.

Re: Slingbox
 

Yes should give that VPN a trial.... I just realised the following is probably the most user friendly way to go. I've already given Boxee a trial on my comp, works great, not quite as good as XBMC but a hell of a lot easer to set up,, All I have to do is plug it into the TV and away I go.... (May have to change over to a N rather than a G modem though)

http://www.dlink.com/boxee/more.html

Someone should set themselves up in business installing these alternatives. I reckon theres a massive market for this. Bit of clever marketing and Woosh... Should be a high take up of internet TV over the next 10 years, especially once people realise they dont have to have Cable/Sat TV.

Pity I aint got the guts to do it myself.... you never know the Post Office could come up with a Redundancy Package in the next 18 months or so ;)

It's just that little bit too complicated for the average householder, so there is bound to be a fantastic market for World Wide no international barrier TV.

One thing I have realised, with these larger download limits from TPG/IInet etc is that people dont really need to download movies and store them for future use anymore... You can just get them on the day ;) No need to have large amounts of storage dedicated to a video media library. You never know the Movie Companies may even see the writing on the wall and start charging 2 bucks for a 'streamed' movie.

Re: Slingbox
 

I'm using Overplay VPN at the moment. I've had it for about 3 months and so far, so good. They have servers all round the world, so if one is slow you can connect via another country. I tend to only connect during the night as well.

Before I had Hideipvpn but had mixed results.

Re: Slingbox
 

How much does that one cost? I'll give it a look if I ever have problems with hIPvpn - so far its all been good though.

Re: Slingbox
 

Hi Freebo...

What kind of NAS are you using as your host, I take you this is back in the UK? I was going to leave the slingbox at my parents house in Scotland, but also want to setup some form of a vpn/proxy tunnel so again were not restricted to Sky and can watch the likes of iplayer & itv player. Altough saying that Sky are releasing an on damand service soon to customers who have HD subscription and Sky internet, so hopefully that will be useful too. I'm looking to purchase a mac mini and just setup that up beside my TV and use it as a media server, so I don't have to get a cable TV package.

Interesting to hear other peoples experiences with VPN and proxy services.

I had a look at the whirlpool site and there seems a few choices. Has anyone had any issues getting a static IP from any of the providers?

Re: Slingbox
 

If someone does set up this business I will be your first customer, fed up of paying Foxtel for the various packages that cover our viewing needs!! :thumbup:

Re: Slingbox
 

just use a vpn

Re: Slingbox
 

Hi Dave,
My NAS is a Netgear readynas but any NAS will do (got this one cheap and I love to do these configs as efficiently as possible), so long as its running Linux and you can install your own stuff on it. The NAS is sitting in my study in Sydney and is running a passthrough proxy to my VPN account in the UK. The proxy (squid) is just a bit of linux software which listens on a particular port & forwards traffic to the VPN server. Then the media client (PS3 in my case) is set up to proxy to the IP address of the NAS and the port its providing proxy services on.

I do it this way only because my NAS is always on and I don't need my PC (Mac in my case) to be on in order to watch iPlayer. This is needed simply because while the PS3 can be configured for a proxy/vpn it cant provide authentication information to one (login/password for the VPN account).

A much simpler way is to have a home cinema PC or laptop connected directly to your TV and have that pointed at your VPN account, but I already had the PS3 and NAS and find it useful to have a central always on proxy server, this way I can watch iplayer on any pc/mac/media client in the house, its also great for Spotify, which I stream to my home cinema amp for a free on demand jukebox of pretty much any track except the Beatles. The PS3 is a great media client and does a wonderful job of playing HD material, but there are several others which would work equally well.

I did muse about setting up a service to configure solutions like this for people, but the support calls would be a nightmare and I have a day job doing roughly this kind of thing for a financial institution (at least for now).

Now its all set up it "just works" and for anyone technical I can only recommend getting a NAS, as well as storing all my media centrally its a great backup server, proxy host and does all of my downloading automatically.

BTW, I didn't need a static IP for any of the above, to do certain inbound VOIP routing I use dyndns which is a more portable solution if I change ISP.

Re: Slingbox
 

I'm going to steel your setup :thumbsup:

I've got a ReadyNAS Duo, which I just purchased last week, got it setup with 1TB and in the process of getting dyndns setup. From the sounds of it what you have done is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm going to get a mac mini to use as my source to the TV and have the NAS on all the time similar to yourself. I work in IT but never had any real hands on experience with setting all these services up so just trying to get my head round all the steps I need to take and which is the best solution. I'll need to get squid installed and have a play.

Maybe the answer isn't a slingbox???

Re: Slingbox
 

I've got an Xbox classic set up as my media centre but I'm not getting the full value out of it because the ADSL router is on the other side of the room and I can't really run a cable between them. Xbox is a cheap way of doing this, I think mine was $30 or so used from EB Games.

Re: Slingbox
 

Get a wireless gaming adapter, i got one for £30 netgear...

http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-WGE111.../dp/B000637RGQ

Re: Slingbox
 

Thanks, I have a spare Belkin router here but I've never got round to trying to interface with the ADSL router. ADSL is Billion 5200GRC and the Belkin is F5D7230-4.

Re: Slingbox
 

I don't use wireless but prefer homeplug adaptors, wish I'd brought some out with me as they're really expensive here, but I haven't seen wireless do good enough bandwidth for HD material yet - all depends on distance & walls etc.

Re: Slingbox
 

Maybe set up a contract system where the two first calls are free, and anything beyond that are 15 bucks for 15 minutes then a dollar a minute from that point on. You would need a Visa merchant number and their credit card details of course.


How much did your Nas system cost ?

Re: Slingbox
 

Having worked in IT for quite a while, it's bad enough trying to explain things to competent users over the phone, let alone home users...:p

Re: Slingbox
 

I was lucky with the NAS, Netgear where doing a "free extra drive" and it was an offer as an 'open box return' from DAB's in the UK. All up it cost £199 and the drives where worth £130 of that so the unit itself cost me about £70.

Its a ReadyNas Duo like Dave has, there are ones with more drive bays and faster CPU's but this one does me fine (it has been known to spend 5 hours unpacking a bluray rip but as it all happens automatically its no problem).

I'll give the visa thing some thought, especially if my day job contract isn't renewed.

If anyone's interested I also run SABnzbd+ on it, one click and it downloads, unpacks & sends me an email when its done all ready on a network share for viewing, its also setup to automatically download new TV episodes via an RSS feed as they become available. I'm happy with the setup - wish my commercial projects went as smoothly!

Re: Slingbox
 

Hi freebo,

Do you download torrents when using hideipvpn?

Thanks for all this advise, I may still get a Slingbox but do think my main source of TV now is going to be a setup simliar to you.

Re: Slingbox
 

I don't use torrents at all, only newsgroups.

There's no need to use a vpn when downloading from newsgroups as I've configured the session to use an encrypted connection, and of course I never download anything which is subject to copyright :wink_smile:

Re: Slingbox
 

I only download movies which I have previously purchased...;)

So have you got rules setup on your proxy so the llikes of an iplayer request hits it and your newsgroup requests bypass it? If thats the case is that something which is easy to do with the proxy add-on on the NAS?

Re: Slingbox
 

Not exactly - the proxy is listening on an IP:Port, my media player is pointed at that IP:Port.

When the NAS (which is also running the proxy server) wants to access the internet to download something it consults its routing table and uses its default gateway (which is my ISP), when my Mac wants to access the net it does the same thing, but my media player is configured to point at the proxy and therefore the traffic gets routed over the VPN connection.

Anything not configured to use the proxy goes out of the normal, NAT'd internet connection. I also have a proxy switcher configured on on my web browser so I can test the proxy connection by switching to it, but the rest of the time my web browser is routed through my normal IP. If I wanted the NAS to use the VPN:proxy I'd set its proxy address as localhost:port number. It helps a great deal in the above if you use static IP's for all devices on the home network, I couldn't be arsed to setup my own DNS for about 10 devices total).

I only download free software under the GNU license agreement.

This took longer to explain than it did to set up :)

Lastly - I highly recommend Billion routers, so many more features than home Linksys/netgear/Belkin etc.