I went out and bought a Slingbox Solo the other day - and the best reason I could come up with was that I wanted to see how the the technology works in real life, and to pipe video around the house to all the computer screens we have. (We do, I am sorry to say, already have 2 Sky boxes in the house to let our son choose different viewing from the old folks).

And so far it's a positive experience.

Setting the Slingbox up is extremely simple, as it seems to automatically do all the right things out of the box. I did not change any of our firewall or NAT setting, just plugged it in, gave it a name and let it do its thing.

In the house (i.e. on the local network) I just fired up the client, and after a while it automatically found the Slingbox, and connected to it. After a few seconds it managed to negotiate a decent bitrate (in excess of 4 Mbit/s btw.) and the quality was of course excellent. If you click on the pic below you will see a screenshot.

To my great surprise Benjamin tried connecting from his girlfriends house, and it worked immediately - with no changes to firewalls and NAT's again. All he needed was the ID number of the Slingbox, and it all worked.

The quality is surprisingly good, even on the 512 Kbit/s he was using (we have 2 Mbit/s upload speed from our house).

As far as I can see the Slingbox, when first configured, registers with a central slingbox site and generates a long ID string which it uses to keep a connection open between itself and our Slingbox, and this is used for all external connection attempts.

Effortless and good use of technology.

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