Hi

I already have a Humax HDR but am considering buying an Echostar HDS-600RS for it's Sling capabilities now that Maplin are offering them at £179.99 and with a £7 Discount Voucher to bring it down to £172.99 !


Can I ask existing users a few questions that I can't find answers to on Echostar's website please;-

1) - I'd like to use the Echostar as a central TV 'server' at home so can I connect any of the new TV's with ethernet built-in to my LAN and watch/control the Echostar in another room e.g. the bedroom ?

BTW I've seen the firmware mod for the Humax but it doesn't llok like it can do what I want without fitting a PC to the TV in the bedroom, and I'd like a simple and neat solution.


2) - I can't find a list of Upload speeds vs Picture Quality/Resolution.

Can anyone point me to a source of this info please ?


3) - My home ADSL Upload speed is shown as 764,000 in my Router Stats (so presumably that's bits/sec for the synch speed with my exchange), or 0.50Mbps from www.speedtest.net (so that's presumably the true throughput speed).

Will this be enough to give a watchable picture i.e. not continually pausing etc, assuming enough download bandwidth at the remote location or am I wasting my money buyng a Sling device until I can get a faster Upload speed ?

I'm not looking for HD quality, just to be able to keep up with news and the occasional programme whilst away, and to be able to add recordings to the device for watching when back home.


If anybody uses a HDS-600RS with these sort of upload speeds then I'd really appreciate your comments please.

Cheers and Thanks for any help.

Newsreader

.

No you won't be able to do that. You have to login via a slingbox Internet web page, once you have signed up. This is external to your box

If you watch via your home network the quality is very good almost as good as through the tv direct. It depends on your network speeds.

You can not watch via an ip address or dnla. There is no sw mod either.

I suggest the OP to upgrade his Internet connection to either Virgin/Cable Broadband if he lives in a Cable area or BT Infinity/Sky Fibre Broadband Unlimited from April
or Talk Talk Fibre Boost, etc and he will see a significant increase in speed and Latency

Sling doesn't really do glitching, pausing, or re-buffering. As long as there's a connection, you get continuous video (except when pressing the virtual remote control buttons - that can cause a glitch). I've seen it work down to ~150kbps. I doubt it would work on dial-up.

The picture quality seems to match YouTube/iPlayer/etc at a similar bitrate.


I had something very strange happen the other week: my broadband upload speed tripled over night. So I went from ~300kbps to ~1Mbps. At 300kbps, the picture quality was like the lowest YouTube setting (though from a decent source, which most YouTube videos aren't!). At ~1Mbps, it's like the good PC iPlayer streams (not as good as the 3Mbps HD ones, but sharper than the 500kbps lower quality ones).

I'm using a Slingbox Solo. I assume the Sling technology is the same or better in the Freesat box.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.