Peter's Blog

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.

Anyone thinking of buying a slingbox in the uk to use with your pocketpc be warned: slingbox have been dangling a $30 mobile version of the player in front of our noses for months with no sign of them actually selling it to anyone outside the us. They have a 30 day free trial that I used back in July time and expired four months ago and since then I have been waiting for them to start selling the damn thing.

I read now that after promising a mac version of the player last January they are only now getting around to previewing it.

Slingbox is a nice product but the company selling it has a death wish:

• slingbox only allows one client to connect. Not two, not five, just one. Slingbox client won't record programs. Slingbox is scared of US broadcasters.
• they slipped encryption into an upgrade to break third party recorder software so they are willing to pull mean DRM tricks that reduce functionality.
• slingbox announce products and take months to ship them. Apparently the boxes in the shops have a black sticker over a palm logo because they gave up trying to deliver.
• slingbox cannot organise selling software over the internet outside the US. What?

Since you are going to have to wait for slingplayer mobile while Sling discover paypal you might as well wait for a better product to come along.

As I write this I'm sitting in a hotel bar with a latte. I'm using my laptop to surf and watching 'Richard and Judy' via my slingbox

Wifi in the hotel is £6/hour so I won't be doing it for long

I am not happy with my hp rx1950 pocketpc. Its lack of memory makes it flaky running multiple applications, some suddenly terminate without saving their data. They also randomly terminate when I turn it on from standby. This means that to be safe I have to exit the applications before powering down which makes continuing work tedious as I have to reopen the application in the right document. When memory is running short it can get very sluggish and it will often lock up and I have to press the reset button and wait a minute or so for it to reboot (it runs a version windows remember).

The upshot of all this is that I don't do any notetaking on it, which is the main reason I bought it.

It is fine for slingbox, surfing, rss etc, although slingbox player locks up if I try to use the remote control in landscape mode: could be slingbox but more likely the O/S and it's appetite for memory (needs 20M or so of RAM out of 32M: how much? What is it doing with it? How much of this could/should have been fixed in ROM?).

Options:

• Buy Dell axim X51 or HP hx2490
• Give rx1950 to wife/sell on ebay/use for satnav (it's too gutless for skype which would be the main use the wife could make of it)
• Live with it

Decisions.

Update: Bought a new Dell Axim x51v via ebay for £80 off Dell price, currently in the post. This is one of the fastest WM5 PDA's there is so it should have the horsepower for skype and it has twice as much ram so hopefully apps won't randomly terminate. Incidentally, I tried Minimo, a port of firefox to pocketpc, and it was hopeless, barely managed to show google.com. I think this was down to memory demands, given that firefox is pretty gluttonous in this regard.

x51v features compared to rx1950:

• cpu more than twice as fast
• 256M flash
• 64M RAM
• bluetooth
• 640x480 screen vs 320*240
• 3d graphics accelerator
• compact flash slot as well as SD which rx1950 has.
• an actual button to turn wifi on and off

I think the decider in making me buy this was the prospect that daynotez might be usable on it.

The novelty of the Slingbox hasn't worn off after five days:

• TV anywhere there is wifi
• TV on pocketpc (hp rx1950) around the house: watch in bed without waking wife/baby
• useable on wireless laptop where picture shows in a sidebar while I surf
• Remotely control PVR (albeit painfully sluggishly: there is a lag in the video stream so when you do something you have to wait to see the effect)
• Playback is pretty smooth, not crystal clear but watchable

It's the dog playing a piano thing, you just gasp that it does it at all, you don't really listen to the music.

The DVB tuner in the slingbox isn't as sensitive as the one in the humax PVR 9200T. The PVR receives all channels fine whereas the Slingbox struggles on the BBC channels where the signal is weaker, only 45% or so. I have the same problem with a cheapo Digimax freeview tuner that I bought in Tesco. Still, the Slingbox's tuner is only useful to me when the PVR locks up and it hasn't done that since I upgraded the firmware to 1.0.6 (fingers crossed).

I haven't blogged for weeks but I've now done something so cool I cannot keep quiet about it. I've solved my mobile TV-watching problems. I have been trying for ages to build a reliable PVR system using the Hauppauge Nova-T USB and had given up because of the flaky software that is around.

My solution: Humax PVR-9200T Dual Tuner 160G PVR plus a SlingBox.

Humax PVR-9200T bullet list:

• easy to set up
• sensitive tv tuner, finds all channels where Nova-T struggled to find any.
• channel changing speed none too bad
• can do picture in picture
• can schedule recordings from the EPG
• can download recordings to PC using USB port
• can upload MP3s to play on it a-la juke box.
• can upload jpegs to look at on it
• can upgrade the firmware using an RS232 port, not via USB. Have to borrow cable from work.

Summary: good player

UPDATE: player locks up regularly when left on Channel 4. This seems to be a common gripe, something to do with the digital teletext for Big Brother. Will try updating firmware and using a better aerial booster.

UPDATE2: upgraded firmware over-the-air. Box ran overnight for the first time.

The Slingbox takes the output of the PVR and broadcasts it over a network. I can watch TV on laptops or my pocketpc both at home and anywhere I can get an internet connection. The Slingbox has two notable limitations:

1. the Sling Player software won't record the video stream
2. only one client can watch the output at one time

These seem to be anti-piracy measures: I cannot put up a feed where anyone on the internet can watch channel 4.

SlingBox Bullet List:

• easy to set up
• PC Software only downloadable: no CD in the box?
• software is nice, slick and well designed.
• SlingBox has IR transmitters to control your PVR (or DVD Player, TV tuner or whatever your source is). This makes control sluggish and it doesn't support everything the PVR can do (e.g. turn on picture-in-picture).
• have to pay extra $30 for pocket pc version of the software: what a rip.
• the uk version includes a DVB-T tuner (i.e. freeview) but it's not as sensitive as the Humax (which found all the local channels) and the control of it is pretty basic: no EPG!!

Summary: it is good but over-priced

Hooking two consumer devices together has solved my problems: within two hours it was all working. It is not the cheapest solution but it is cheaper than a dedicated media PC would be. By cancelling my sky+ subscription the PVR will pay for itself.