Slingbox Personal Broadcaster Editorial Review (Page 6 of 8)
The Slingbox in Action
The Slingbox streams video using Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 codec, which is a powerful video encoder that can compress video streams to a small size while maintaining good playback quality. What's unique about the Slingbox is that it uses Sling's proprietary SlingStream (also known as Lebowski, named after the famous movie character from "The Big Lebowski") technology. SlingStream automatically adjusts all video streaming parameters on the fly to compensate for a various network conditions. In other words, if you're at a busy Wi-Fi spot, SlingStream will make sure you get the best quality possible based on whatever bandwidth it has available. 
After connecting to my Slingbox, the picture appeared almost instantly. After about 10 seconds of optimizing the stream was steady around 750-800K, and the image quality was fabulous. During my testing, I experienced no problems with the audio syncing up correctly with the video.
The Slingbox can be viewed in many different ways, including full-screen. The bigger you go, the worse the picture. If you feel adventurous, you can enable the "Fit to Player" option, which will max out the image size based on how big the SlingPlayer window is. 
I decided to see how the Slingbox handled fast moving video, so I channel surfed until I came across the Power Rangers, an annoying (and rather cheesy) kids action show. As you can see from the images above, the quality gets fuzzy when you take it up this large, especially if you're on top of the screen. However, it doesn't look as bad when viewed from a distance. The graphics capability of your computer will make a huge impact on how this looks, so individual results will vary. 
The Slingbox performed admirably right off the bat, but fast moving action sequences were a tad on the jerky side. In full-screen mode, the jerkiness was noticeably worse. I flipped over to the SlingPlayer options menu and found some helpful settings under the "Encoding" tab. By default, SlingStream is set for medium action, so I flipped it over to high to see if it would help. The result was surprisingly dramatic. The image didn't jerk at all in windowed mode, and full-screen movement improved considerably. Apparently, setting it correctly for the type of video stream is important. Of course, video tweakers can override SlingStream and set the parameters manually if they wish. At home, I saw little difference (if any) between manual and automatic adjustments.
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