12:22 PM PDT on Saturday, August 20, 2005

By TERRY MAXON / The Dallas Morning News

What if you're here and the video you want to watch is in the next room, the next town or on the next continent?

DAVID LEESON II/Staff photo

The Slingbox can send video from your TV or other source to your computer via your home network or the Internet.

The Slingbox seeks to answer that need by letting you stream video to your computer, whether it's in your home office or far, far away.

I didn't have the opportunity to check the Slingbox's ability to send a video signal across the Internet, but I can tell you it works pretty well inside my own home network. I watched TV on both my landlocked desk computer and my wireless laptop, and it can only be described as neat.

I changed channels, hit the menu button, got information about the cable channel I was watching and did most things I would have been able to do from my living-room sofa.

The picture admittedly is nowhere near the quality one receives from the television set. And the speed of the video stream determines the quality of the video.

Sometimes, the download speed dropped to 200 to 300 kilobits per second, and the action got pretty choppy. But when speeds jumped to 1.4 to 1.5 megabits per second, the action flowed fairly naturally.

The value of the Slingbox, though, isn't measured in whether the picture meets high-definition standards, because it most certainly does not. Its coolness depends on the idea that one can remotely control and view the video from a cable box, a satellite receiver or other video sources.

The Slingbox gets the television signal into your computer in three ways. You can get it directly with an Ethernet cable. You can hook it up to your home network. Or you can pick it up off the Internet if your home router is configured properly and you've got Slingbox software on your remote computer.

The Slingbox was relatively easy to set up, with clear instructions for using it on a computer or through a home network. I hooked up the Slingbox, a compact silver device, to my cable box, then linked the Slingbox to my home network.

More complicated is configuring the Slingbox software, the computer and the router to allow your computers elsewhere to tap into the same video feed. Some routers will automatically set themselves up to handle the chore; mine didn't. Plus, my router was set up through a Macintosh on my network, and the Slingbox currently works only on Windows XP.

Slingbox software provides a viewing window, which can cover most of the monitor's screen, plus a virtual remote control that controls the video device to which you're hooking up – cable box, satellite tuner or digital video recorder.

After trying the cable box, I hooked up the Slingbox to my camcorder and pointed the lens at my wife, then watched her image on my computer. The device gives you another way to remotely keep track of the kids or the babysitter, the contractor or the dog.

I then watched the video feed on my wireless laptop, even walking around outside the house as I kept up with Julia Stiles as she was chasing her Danish prince in The Prince and Me.

And for those into virtual annoyance, you can keep changing the channels even when you're somewhere else. My son in the living room and I in the office had a pitched flipping duel between the Cartoon Network and the History Channel.

Slingbox's seller, San Mateo, Calif.-based Sling Media Inc., says that it plans to expand the Slingbox to work with Apple Macintoshes, smart cellphones and personal digital assistants in coming months, but it hasn't announced release dates.

Pros: Watch television from home anywhere you have a computer hooked up to the Internet.

Cons: Requires Windows XP; router needed to send signal elsewhere; novices may find installation and setup daunting.

Bottom line: If you want to watch the Dallas Cowboys or Desperate Housewives in the South of France, this may be your answer.

E-mail tmaxon@dallasnews.com