
When we first heard of the
Slingbox PRO we thought it was interesting that Sling Media didn't jump on the
HD marketing band wagon and call it the Slingbox HD, after all it has HD capabilities. Once the dust settled it all came together, the PRO's HD capabilities are pretty limited. The $50 component dongle allows HD input up to 1080i as well as component pass through, which is great for all those STBs with only one component output, but the Slingbox can only stream 640x480 at 16x9, uhhohh there go those
rectangular pixels again that everyone gets in
such a tizzy about. This gets down converted even more when streaming over a WAN connection. This isn't all bad as anyone who downloads
HDTV sourced BitTorrent shows can tell you HD still looks better than SD when down-converted to 320x240. It is important to note that this is the first consumer product that can encode HD via component at 1080i, previously this has been too expensive for a consumer product. The other miss here is the lack of
ATSC tuner, maybe they are saving the Slingbox HD name for a box that supports HD streaming from ATSC, Component, HDMI and hopefully
CableCARD support, if CableLABs would ever approve such a device.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brad Linder @ Sep 28th 2006 5:46PM
I just spoke with Sling Media co-founder and CEO Blake Krikorian today, and he indicated that the new Slingbox Pro will be able to stream content at higher than 640 x 480 resolutions in the future. He wasn't real specific on what resolution it would max out at, but he emphasized that since Slingbox is software-based, the company can continually update its features via software updates.
You can hear more about it in our podcast at: http://www.pvrwire.com/2006/09/28/pvr-wire-podcast-6-9-28-06/
Ben Drawbaugh @ Sep 29th 2006 9:30AM
Brad,
I hear him specifically mention higher bit rates with firmware updates, but it's interesting that he doesn't mention higher resolutions.