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.

First of all - contrary to all reports I've seen, the USB stick can plug straight into the MacBook Air without use of a USB extender cable, as long as you make no sudden movements to dislodge it.

It works very well - except for one omission in the user manual - which held me up for much longer than necessary:

- The accompanying SIM card has to be activated by Vodaphone (call their helpdesk and go through a large number of call-centre options until you get to speak with a human), this then takes around 15 minutes, and suddenly the whole thing springs into life, and just works!

(That is after you run the "Vodafone mobile connect" software as "root" once to set permissions correctly - after that you can run it as any user).

I've even tried this with streaming video from my SlingBox (for short periods of time) with no serious problems.

Excellent!

This is a interesting application - as it will currently only work on jailbroken iPhone's, but they also say that it will be a "proper" app as soon as Apple start selling downloadable applications.

iPhone Video Recorder is a powerful iPhone oriented video recorder produced by DreamCatcher. iPhone Video Recorder records audio and video to the compressed mpeg4 format, so the recording is space saving, an-hour-high-quality recording will be a file as small as 60MB. iPhone Video Recorder boasts a frame rate up to 15fps which guarantees better recording performance . With iPhone Video Recorder, recording is easy and enjoyable, you may play back the video, download it to a computer, upload to Youtube, or send it out by email as you wish.

[From iPhone Video Recorder]

Slim Devices have been making opensource MP3 software and non-transportable players for connecting to a standard stereo for several years now, and I have earlier blogged their announcement of a high-end player, called Transporter.

But this is the first review I have seen:

Slim Devices Transporter Digital Music Player Review — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News :

Slim Devices Transporter Digital Music Player Review

#9by Clint DeBoer

The reviewer seems to have done a reasonably detailed job, and his conclusions are really that the device is very, very good.

So now - can I afford one??

Technorati Tags: hifi

Automated Home has a good review of the Vodafone USB modem - but the part that is most interesting to me is their experiences in using this on a Mac under OsX - if you want to read the rest of their review then follow the link below:

Using on a Mac requires a software installation from the CD (included in the package) before inserting the modem. We had an issue when installing on our MacBook (Leopard/Intel) which caused an error message on launch ("An exception of class NilObjectException was not handled. The application must shut down"). A quick call to Vodafone’s business support got us in touch with a guy that knew what the problem was. Although we were asked to authenticate during install with our admin users/password it seems you cannot run the software from a non-administrator account without first running it from the admin account and activating it.