I spend a majority of my time away from home sitting inside of an ambulance and wanted a way to watch sharks hockey and stumbled upon sling box. I bought one today at best buy but when I was setting it up onto my brothers spare cable box I realized that I had no way to connect to his broadband modem which is in a different room. The sling box 350 model I ordered does not have WiFi and requires a wired Ethernet connection. Now I am wondering what would be the best solution to provide the best upload speeds? Sling box suggests universal WiFi adapters or electric power adapter bridges. I know nothing about either of these devices.

Looking for suggestions on how to get this thing running. Also if I buy a wireless router does it have to be connected with an Ethernet cable to the Comcast provided broadband modem? Thanks!

 

1) Wireless adapter information from slingbox here: Slingbox.com - Works Great with Slingbox

Basically, you can use an adapter that connects to wifi and plug that into the slingbox's ethernet jack. I'd reccomend this over power line networking, especially if you have 5ghz wifi.

2) Yes, the wireless router will need to be plugged into the modem.

 

Okay thanks yea I just saw that but no actual reviews from real people of what works best. So wireless adapter is the best way to go? Any specific brands and models besides the Bethesda ones on the page?

 

Heads up about the Slingbox, it's a known issue that the electrolytic capacitors on them are underated. I had to fix a friend's box by putting some new, bigger caps in. If it starts giving you grief down the road, that's a likely cause, and I can do it for you if need be. Plenty of tutorials online if you wana do it yourself too.

 

I got a powerline kit you can HAVE. Doesn't work at my house once I changed the breaker panel out. So might as well try that first if your brother has a spare ethernet port on his router.

 

Sweet thanks guys. I'll give the power line kit a shot first and see how it goes. Are you still in union city? I remember buying parts from you a super long time ago. Will send pm!

 

SimpleTV is another good slingbox type deal. I love mine.

 

I just did some research on it so simple.TV just let's you stream local free antenna channels to mobile devices? More of a substitution for basic cable service right?

 

Did you wire up the IR blaster and the powerline kit?

 

Kind of, its a DVR for a DTV antenna. Basically, a TiVO for over the air and/or basic cable, but the box also functions like a Slingbox. You can stream the TV to your phone, etc, when you're not at home and to a Roku or similar device in your house.

 

Yea thanks again! You're the man! I don't even think I needed the ir blaster turns out I had the slingbox remote programmed incorrectly. Once I chose the right one it worked. Only problem now is there's a buzzing sound. I double checked all the composite cables but it still buzzes. It didn't buzz when I had split the coax instead of using the powerlines adapters but for some reason I think it's unrelated, going to try to troubleshoot it next week when. Have free time.

 

Probably ground loop off the coax coming from the wall. Get a Ground Loop Isolator from radio shack or amazon. Should do the job.

 

I have seen the power line adapters introduce "noise" into an audio stream on my slingbox, I switched to a trendnet media bridge. It gives you "N" speed ie. 55mb DL's and 14mb uploads. I'm also a cable tech for the local cable company here, and have tried a lot of different methods, that way works the best

 

Yeah it's possible. Different circuit breaker sets and electrical wiring are the most detrimental though.

The ones I gave him worked really well for me until I had the breaker panel changed out. After that they couldn't talk to each other, even connected to the same outlet, .5 inch apart.

I got a Dlink Media bridge to get my living room connected to the office router. But eventually I'm going to run CAT6 and be done with it.

 

Did this two winters ago. Pull from my rack in the master closet:
Augmented cat6
4x to living room
2x to bed #2, #3, #4
2x to garage
6x to office (bed #5)
1x to front eaves of house
1x to center of celling (top floor)
1x to kitchen ceiling

This was on top of the cat5e I already had pulled. the ceiling drops are for my APs which are, along with the front eave drop (camera), are all PoE. It's overkill but also totally worth never having to do any of that bull**** ever again.