I got mine tonight (compusa had their midnight sale, figures I would go in for something not on sale, heh). They had three on top of their camera shelf behind the display cabinet. The packaging is interesting to say the least. There's the clear plastic external box, the internal "packaging" which consists of a cardboard sleave that holds two boxes together, one box holding cables, and the other box kind of encasing the slingbox in the middle. Its practically like an origami puzzle just to unwrap the thing.
The unit is well made; it's curiously got feet positioned such that it provides ventilation from whatever flat surface it sits on, but if you had two to stack on top of each other they would kind of interlock. The front provides two green led's, one for power and the other for network; and the middle "n" of the Sling logo on the front glows red, i think when I'm connected.
When I took the software cd out, it had a sticker on it telling me to go to the website to get updated software. On one hand, I thought this was brilliant, as I always like to have the latest drivers or software of whatever item, and this really focuses users to do so. On the other hand, it's almost concerning that this product just barely came on the retail shelves, and already it has software updates.
So I downloaded the software; it's 25 megabytes, wow. I install it, and it finds my Slingbox, and tells me it has a new firmware update from 1.00 to 1.09 already. So I let it do its update; for some reason, it hangs at 500kb out of I think 1.4mb; I panic, and let it sit for another 10 minutes; The screen indicates it should only take a few more minutes, but it doesn't progress.
I click cancel, and the installer warns me that I may have to reset the box or something. I cancel anyway; and then try again. I power cycle the sling box, then run the installer; it finds the slingbox, tells me it's going to upgrade the firmware. I click ok hesitantly (there's no other choice) and it thankfully finishes the upgrade this time.
I'm very astonished and impressed by the huge amount of ir codes it seems to have available, including for my ReplayTV DVR. It has TiVo dvr codes, and most standard tv, cable, and satellite box codes as well.
Nearing completion of installation, it needs to finish resetting the network settings. In a way, it's too bad theres no way to directly input settings into the device, such as I can set network settings on my ReplayTV with my remote; but as long as the client finds the box, it should be able to configure what it needs to. In this case, however...
I have an interesting setup, and most likely not supported by what Sling Media recommends. I have a PC with a wireless card, connected to a wireless router. This PC also runs XP ICS internet sharing to my Replay TV. This shared internet I planned to feed into the SlingBox as well, except the SlingBox wants a static ip address.
I find theres a way to set static IPs in ICS, so I configure it to do so. Were the ICS in XP UPnP supported, the SlingBox would have just told XP the settings it required. I thought ICS did have UPnP, so I kept telling the installer to do the automatic setup, but it kept failing to setup throught UPnP, so I ended up doing the manual configuration.
If you want to stream video out through the internet, you need to open port 5001. I opened it on my ICS, and opened that connection on the physical router, so now the SlingBox can be accessed out on the internet.
Testing over Lan, it streamed at 900kbps. Video quality was excellent, and the ability to control all aspects of my ReplayTV over a remote connection was amazing. Streaming over wifi seemed to run around 300-400kbps, still very good quality, though running into the VCD quality range.
For kicks, I tried streaming through a Sprint PCS Vision connection, which is supposed to get peak 190kbps, with an average of maybe 80-120kbps. Unfortunately, the latency is probably too high, as the video was stuttering and choppy, even after fiddling with the video settings.
As it has been noted in some places, you cannot have multiple users watching simultameously; most users probably don't have the bandwidth for it anyways. If you try to connect and watch while someone else is watching, it will give you an error telling you someone else is already connected. I might have liked to see an option to kick the other user off, heh.
Another interesting note is that by default, when full screened, the image does not take up the full screen; this is because the software considers the tv image and resolution to be VGA resolution, and formats the picture to 640x480. You can bypass this by telling it to change the video size to fit the player, but if you didn't rtfm like I didn't, then you might be confused at first.
All in all, I love this product. It enhances my replaytv by allowing me to watch recorded shows and set recordings anywhere on the internet. I know DVArchive can provide most of this capability as well, but this is a much easier, albiet more costly solution. Although I like the product, I fear it may end up either a niche product like a DVR, or it may face legal obstacles, like the first mp3 players, or how ReplayTV was sued to take out commercial advance. That's why I decided to get mine immediately.
I've heard a lot of complaining that the product doesn't do HDTV. If those individuals knew how much bandwidth is required to stream HDTV, they should be happy to get even EDTV over a streaming connection, imho. This product is designed to stream tv at tv quality, and does so pretty well.
regards,
-e
Then, I got another error, which I couldn't get around. The player won't play if you don't have a sound card. 
