I had some work done on the TV aerial in my house, moving it from inside the loft to outside. I didn't do it myself due to extreme vertigo. The digital TV signal is now much stronger, no more artifacts and stuttering on BBC channels. This was a good excuse to dig out my old Slingbox which has been sitting on a shelf since I moved last september.
I have set it up with it's internal DVB TV tuner which allows me to watch something vaguely interesting on the pc while my daughter watches 'In the Midnight Garden' on the main TV in the computer room. This TV is connected to my Humax PVR which is very good for recording kids tv to repeat ad-infinitum. She's been watching the same episodes of Balamory since christmas, they sing christmas songs between the episodes.
The picture is very good on the whole. If I maximise it on my 24" widescreen monitor it is pretty pixellated and nasty but I watch it in a little box, maybe 4", in the corner of the screen and there is still plenty of space to work. Alternatively I can watch TV wirelessly at the bottom of the garden on the laptop. I did a proof of principal at the weekend but not for long as watching TV in the bright sunshine in the garden just seems wrong.
During my slinging haitus Slingmedia seem to have started selling the Pocket PC version of the player software in the UK. It's £20. I dug out my old Dell Axim v51 as it is in the compatibility list, I charged it up and all the programs are still there, stored in flash but it had lost the current time. I haven't installed the sling player software on it, I'll see how riveting TV has become during my nine months of televisual apathy.
Another option to investigate is the BBC's new streaming video service, only available to UK licence payers (ya boo). This has the advantage of being PVR like, being able to choose when to watch something. This is the main limitation of the slingbox, it cannot record or timeshift unless you connect it to a PVR. Channel 4 have a similar service and more interesting programs (none of those endless talent shows with judges, one of them a baddy), must investigate that too.
Now I have a strong TV signal and a powerful pc I may investigate the options for recording, timeshifting and streaming on the PC. Hopefully the technology has moved on from the awful state it was in last time I tried a few years back now.
UPDATE: fate succombed to the temptation and the signal was too weak when I got home to watch anything but BBC. OK next morning. Slingbox's aerial feed is chained after the Humax PVR which was working fine. An inline booster may fix the problem but that's more power consumption and cables.
Peter's Moblog
