Just wondering what the difference between the slingplayer and orb are for people that have both. From what I gather the sling seems like it would be easier to set up and need lower bandwidth whereas the orb would allow full access to your computer and it's free.

Ajay

I think with orb, you need to have your computer turned on at all times, but with orb, you just need your TV signal plugged into the slingbox, and you can also plug in your TIVO, dvd player, other media sources.

Question: If I have digital cable, and I run it to the slingbox, If I then run the signal out of the slingbox into my TV, will I have to watch the same channels that are playing on slingbox as is playing on my TV?

Is there any way to split the signal so that I can have separate control of the slingbox and the TV?

Think of it this way...in the days before consumer routers became so available as today, I had to run a dedicated, always-on PC which had two NIC cards, one coming from teh cable/dsl modem, the other hooked to a switch to which all my other computers hooked up.

In this case with the Slingbox (SB), SB is your dedicated slinging computer, if you will - versus having a dedicated, always on computer running the Orb server slinging video to you.

Of course there are other differences btwn SB and Orb, but the basic concept of SB vs. Orb as I explained makes sense to my girl.

Slingbox also doesn't allow you to stream audio right?

Sure it does. There are actully three settings in the Slinplayer Mobile Client, all of which stream audio:

1. You can stream tv in "normal" tv mode with audio
2. you can stream tv in "slideshow" mode with audio
3. you can just stream the audio with no video, kinda like listening to a tv station on the radio

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The only constant is change.

What I mean is that if I hook up SlingBox to my media center pc, I'm pretty sure I can access my videos and live tv, but will I be able to access my music files?

To answer the question of why don't I just use orb, I do, but it just isn't stable enough for me because they are dependent on changes windows makes. I figure it's worth paying for slingbox so I don't have to troubleshoot so frequently.

Sorry, I misunderstood, I thought you were talking about TV audio (kind of a dumb mistake, now that I think about it, why would anyone make a device that could broadcast TV video withouth the audio, duh!!)

Nope, sorry to say that you can't sling audio files from you pc.

Although, I suppose if a "media center pc" had an audio out RCA or headphone jack, and an infrared remote control, that brought up and controlled an on-screen guide like a DVD player, or TIVO does, theoretically you should be able to run it throught the sling box. As a matter of fact, I found this post in the slingmedia.com forum: http://www.slingcommunity.com/forum/thread/11435/ Additionally, searching on the term "media center pc" in the slingmedia forums also brought up several other threads.

Another thought, you could buy one of these (although it costs as much as the slingbox) and run media center through your sling box: http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...1841&pfp=srch1

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The only constant is change.

Thanks Jim. Actually I bought a Slingbox last night and hooked it directly to the media center. I didn't know that slingbox uses the resident interface, so I can do anything I can do with my media center, with slingbox, including playing all my music. I'm very impressed! It's much faster than Orb and being able to use the Media Center interface is great. To me it was worth the 200 bucks, even though Orb is free.

I was going to post that I thought mrailing had his audio system hooked up to the slingbox as well...

Of course, I just Sling XM radio off my DirecTV...

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Jeremiah 29:11

mwfielder, did you notice that the MLB channel and the Opie and Anthony channel just got dropped from the XM DirecTV lineup? Those were the two I liked most!