You mean that you have a dedicated cable feed for the Slingbox, split from your normal TV feed?

Do not need a dedicated cable feed for the Sling Box, the Sling Box goes "between" your PVR / Digital Recorder and your TV.

With my TV set up I run my HD TV from my PVR to the TV and there is an available SVG connection that I run from my PVR to the Sling Box.

It is a great tool, especially when you get to a hotel and want to catch up with your local news, or like last night watching the Oilers win against the ducks!

no "need" for a dedicated feed, the slingbox will SIT between any two devices, or any three devices,

there are a couple of inputs, a composite setup, s-video, RF and there is an INTERNAL cable tuner so that you can do cable WITHOUT a second box, AND another cable box, or a TIVO or a DVD player or satellite box. The cable tuner will only do basic, nothing that requires authentication but still you can have THAT PLUS you cable DVR or another device all running through the same slingbox.

Okay, something I have never been able to discover for sure, but maybe this answers it. If Slingbox goes between the TV and the Digital Recorder, does that mean using Slingbox, you are unable to watch shows that you have recorded on your DVR or TIVO?

I have looked into getting a Slingbox, but most of what I want to watch are things that I have recorded on the DVR (I need my Adult Swim fix but it comes on too late to actually watch it).

Why not just use Tivo2Go then? You can watch your shows on your PC with that.

it doesn't really go between your TV and item, it can, but the best thing is to have it alongside the devices.

Your DVR most likely will have two OUTS, one is going to the tv, one would go to the slingbox.

Now, if YOU are watching with the slingbox, slinging something from the DVR and controlling the DVR then indeed that is the only thing that could be watched at that time on the TV. The DVR may have two tuners, but they only have ONE out.

If you have cable, you could watch that or the person in front of the TV could watch that. etc. etc.

yes you can, but you have to go through the process of transfering all the shows you want, taking up space and then of course anything that you haven't transfered before going out of town or away from their tivo (does anyone really ever go AWAY from their TIVO?) then all those shows wouldn't be there.

I have tivo2go, and use it rarely now. Since, I like to watch my local & national news while out of the country and of course all the items that I haven't yet seen.

Yes, it actually works, within the limits of what it is.

When I travel, I set up a wireless router in the hotel room, so that I can use my laptop anywhere. My connection is wireless router to hotel wired-ethernet to my home router/gateway (via DSL) to a hub to the Slingbox. In most locations I get reasonable, but sub-broadcast quality. The Slingbox folks have developed software specifically tailored for the application, and it works pretty well. The video is buffered, sometimes by as much as 7-seconds, so freezes and drop-outs are rare. It does, however, make controlling the Tivo a little more difficult. As with any temporal compression video codec (like mpeg2, which is used for DVD), the more motion in the picture, the more data most be sent and the more likely that video quality will suffer somewhat. I find it is more than adquate for my daily fix of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show. If I was watching a heavily visual show (Lost, for example), I'd probably go to ABC's website and use their Flash download. Overall, I like my Slingbox a lot, and find that I use it quite a bit when I'm on the road, particularly if my wife is with me.

The Slingbox can take its video feed from the DVR or Tivo, so you can view anything that comes through the DVR -- live television, recorded programs, etc.

I do the equivalent to Tivo2Go with a Series 1 DirecTivo. From what I've read, the tools that I use are substantially faster than Tivo2Go. I have been known to use VNC from a remote location to transfer a show from my Tivo to my computer, where I'll transcode it to mpeg2 and place it on my FTP server, so that I can download it wherever I am. This gets me far better video quality than I'd get with my Slingbox. However, transferring a 1-hour program and transcoding it takes about 20 minutes on my system and results in approximately 1-gigabyte or so of video data. That can take 6-8 hours to download via FTP, depending on where I am.

With the Slingbox, I get instant gratification -- I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want. I tend to use the longer "copy, transcode and download" approach for shows that have some visual element, e.g. Lost or The Amazing Race. For other shows, e.g. The Colbert Report or the Daily Show, I'll use the Slingbox.

the othe really nice thing about the slingbox is the mobile componant.

I use a sprint 6700 with their EVDO network and get great throughput on the train, on 280 while driving or anywhere else I am in most major cities. I can just turn on the news and listen with an earpiece, or plug the audio into the car jack and have instant CNBC, CNN, news, whatever.

I had about 20 minutes before the opening of da vinci code the other day, and we just watched the nightly news right there in the theatre. Why wait till we get home. When in the airport, plane whatever I just watch the slingbox right on my phone. Quality is really quite good even over the EVDO network. I get about 300-500 kps on the mobile slingbox.

Thanks. I guess I will have to look into getting one then.

I already have DVR through the cable company, so I don't want to have to mess with anything else such as Tivo2Go. I just want to watch my recorded shows with a minimum of fuss and expense.

It's not necessary, but yes, I do. I leased a separate cable box/DVR to connect solely to my Slingbox. My thought was that I wanted to be able to watch what I want WHEN I want while on the road without impeding anyone else's watching. It works very well without, so it's really up to your living situation and who watches TV where and when.

Yep, you can watch all of the Tivo shows. You are actually controling the Tivo with another IR feed from the Slingbox..

I can't seem to use Sling when connected at work or via VPN. I have Cisco VPN software and I use an address in the Automatic Proxy Confuguration URL in my browsers (when connected at work only).

Suggestions?

Thanks.