popper
Rated PG
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 Posted: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:52:41 Post Subject: Re: Sling Media Slingbox Personal Video Broadcaster - 04/12/ |
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| Big Bruin wrote: |  | The basic concept of the Slingbox doesn't seem that complicated, but it is definitely unique and offers a whole new way to enjoy two different technologies... The Slingbox allows you to watch and control your television from anywhere. The box connects to your cable TV connection (or other A/V source) and your network, and allows you to use just about any computer to watch television as if you were plopped down right in front of the tube itself. - The Review |
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hi , its me again, and sorry for having to keep going this but i have a few points 
first of all the link to the full spec on page one is broke.
its nice you took some of my thoughts about lan broadcasting in my other posts and produced this peace of kit , thanks.
i agree geerally that this hardware might be a good idea, and cant fault you there.
theres a few things id point out and hope that some future firmware update might correct the current kit.
first of all you mention that "The Slingbox is powered by a high-performance digital signal processor from Texas Instruments" which implys that it can be reprogramed to encode to different codecs in the future, but you fail to mention here (might be in that spec i cant see elseware) what codec its using now ?, Mpeg2, H264/avc or any mention of what screensize the default image is, pal, ntsc, CIF, DVD, VGA(640x480), etc.
also the fact that it currently only allows 1 single connection to the device implys that its probably using Unicast tcp rather than the far more usful option of multicast UDP (at least for the local lan connections) and cant currently do as much as the VLC software viewer/server app.
thats a shame, but if as implyed, they may be able to remotly upgrade this hardware to at least the basic VLC options then evn at this price, it may indeed become a viable replacement, all all truth though id really like to use the far better dscaler TV app with this box as that produce outstanding results.
however to do that this hardware would need to write some form of directx wrapper to fool the Dscaler in to thinking the lan tv was infact directly connected to the current pc or a far better option, help the dscaler developers write a good access option directly into the app.
as for the codecs currently used id hope that the DSP in the kit would be able to do avc in the future if it infact doesnt now ?, and produce a far better output than your screengrab implys, although again dscalers code would probably give a fare better end result ( see source forge for both sw apps).  |
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