[moyekj]

I finally bought a Slingbox AV unit last night and set it up with S-video output from my upstairs S3. On my home LAN everything works great - no issues with slingplayer. Also last night I setup proper port forwarding for my router for port 5001 (the port I'm using) so I can sling from WAN side.
So today I installed slingplayer on my IBM Thinkpad laptop (running XP Pro) at work and was able to connect to my home slingbox. So now to my problem:
The video displayed on my laptop only shows the Tivo graphics overlays - I can't see the main TV video and also I get no sound at all. i.e. If I tune to a live channel I can see the Tivo banner with the description, or I can hit the Tivo button and see Tivo central and then get to all the Tivo menu screens. Even for guide I can see the whole guide but just no video in the background (just a dark background). The statistics for slingplayer show "optimizing" for a while and then "streaming" at a fairly constant bit rate of about 150Kbps or so. In summary I cannot see TV video or get any audio but can see all the Tivo overlay graphics.

On the laptop I was able to go through the slingplayer video tuning with the basketball clip without problems so I know the player can render video on the laptop. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[alansplace]

about your video problem, try reseating both ends of your s-video cable or even try a new cable. the audio requires the use of a red & white rca audio cable from the tivo to the slingbox, did you hook one up?
--
Alan

 

[sfhub]

Can you have someone turn on the TV at home and see what TiVo is putting out on the other interface(s)?

On the surface it doesn't sound like a problem that can be sourced to slingbox because it blindly mpg encodes all the video it is given. It can't really distinguish between TiVo UI and TiVo video.

 

[rodalpho]

Is your TV connected via HDMI? Try connecting it via component and the problem should go away.

Alternatively, leave the TV turned on. Or program your slingbox's composite input remote control to do it. That's what I did.

 

[bananaman]

The statistics for slingplayer show "optimizing" for a while and then "streaming" at a fairly constant bit rate of about 150Kbps or so.

You need at least 256kbps to get consistent results from a Slingbox. Slingmedia have a nice speed tester you can run from home.

 

[moyekj]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. Some more details/responses:
As I mentioned testing on my LAN at home last night everything was working fine (audio & video), so I don't think it's a bad connection between S3 & slingbox which is using RCA for audio along with S-video for video. Couple that with the fact that I get any display at all tells me that at least the S-video connection must be OK. I will have to wait until I'm home again to guarantee that.

I'm using component not HDMI connection to the TV on that S3 so the DRM associated problems with HDMI are not a factor.

I'm certainly not getting 256kbps right now but as sfhub says the slingbox cannot distinguish overlay video from the TV video so it's very strange I can see only the overlay portion. My upstream bandwidth is restricted to 512kbps and I am going through a firewall at work which is probably hindering my speed, but still I can understand getting no video/audio at all but only getting the overlay portion is what is really confusing about this. NOTE: I've tried several different channels, SD and HD all with same results.
Guess the moment of truth will be trying it again on my home LAN once I get home. Could be perhaps that CableCard or something went bad and I'm not able to tune any channel, though I did swap tuners and saw the same problem... Very strange one. I think sfhub is probably right and it has nothing to do with slingbox at all - somehow the S3 output is not putting out video at all on any channels right now for whatever reason.

 

[moyekj]

Well, indeed I got home and for whatever reason I wasn't getting any video from that S3 on either tuner (or either output - S-video or Component). Checking diagnostics showed CCs were operating normally so not sure what the issue was. Rebooted the S3 and now everything is back to normal - just bad coincidence this happened right when testing slingbox. So this is not a slingbox issue after all and mystery solved. Thanks for the replies.

P.S. Stupid me should have thought to reboot the Tivo via slingbox while at work...