Personal Dork Assistant

Slunged

I had it all worked out. Bought the new Slingbox AV and set it up at home in the States, paired it with the old Series 1 Tivo which had lifetime subscription but was otherwise gathering dust. Stashed them in the wiring closet with a direct connections to the cable feed and the network router and it was all set. The Tivo would record the shows and the Slingbox would stream it over the Net so I could finally watch football in Taiwan.

However I found one flaw in my master plan when I got back to Taiwan. I'd bought a new MIMO G router to try to help the wireless coverage in the house (result: meh). But I didn't re-run the Slingbox setup to open the ports necessary for the video stream in the new router. Had to wait until Sam went home to run the Slingbox setup from the inside. At least I remembered to enable UPNP in the router so all Sam had to do was let the software do its thing automagically. Kudos to the Sling team for making the whole setup easy to use despite the vagaries of home networking, NAT redirection, and limited upstream bandwidth.

I was in business once Sam helped open the door. Stayed away from the sports sites in the morning and was able to watch the USC-Notre Dame football game via Slingstream. The quality was barely watchable on the 50" TV, but the software fought to keep the video stream moving smoothly audio was rock-solid, so at worst it was a radio broadcast with crappy video as a bonus. It's been ages since I've been able to sit down and watch a good-old football game on a Sunday afternoon, so just being able to do that was enough for me to feel I got my $'s worth.

Had the Tivo all setup to record the Niners game the next day. However, I couldn't help but peek at the news feed in the morning and saw the headline "Rams snap S.F. winning streak with touchdown late in game". That pretty much let all the air of anticipation out of the balloon in a hurry. There's no fancy gadget out there I can buy to fix the Niners, unfortunately.