Want to waste some money and be frustrated too? Read on

I’ve had a Slingbox Pro since a couple of years – waste of money and space. It does have three inputs – but they are dedicated to one single function each: a tuner, a composite input and some sort of HDMI input for the HD signal. It’s not really HDMI: you connect your HDMI cable to a large dongle, which separates the signal into YUV, if I recall correctly. Huge mess of cables behind the unit, of course.
The TV tuner loses its memory regularly, so requires lengthy retuning. Can’t move around the channels, which means that either you memorise the number of the channels you regularly watch, or you just search through them, one at a time – a slow process. Once you’ve set up your Slingbox, you can start watching TV remotely – until it crashes. And when it crashes, you have to do a hard reset by pulling the plug of the unit, so it’s impossible to do remotely. Yes, I’ve updated the firmware when a new version is available – which is very rare. And Slingbox haven’t had a new product in years, except for a combined satellite tuner with Slingbox capabilities several months ago – so it looks like the company is not going anywhere. I have 20 Mb/s at home and variable rates at remote locations – and the signal, when the unit doesn’t crash, is pretty mediocre – can’t even dream of HD quality.
Concusion: worst way of throwing away a few hundred bucks, with frustration guaranteed. And most decent Linux based satellite tuners are capable of remote video streaming either out of the box or after installing a few free hacks, so why bother with Slingbox?

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