September 18, 2007 7:48 PM
PEOPLE WITH THIS EXACT PROBLEM: DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME! YOUR SLINGBOX IS DEFECTIVE AND NEEDS A REPLACEMENT... DEMAND A WARRANTY REPLACEMENT IF YOU ARE STILL UNDER WARRANTY. IF YOU ARE NOT UNDER WARRANTY, THROW YOUR SLINGBOX AWAY - YOU'LL NEVER GET YOUR REMOTE WORKING AGAIN!
If your Slingbox (in my case a PRO) exhibits these issues:
A - Your perfectly functional/working Slingbox configuration all of a sudden stops displaying the remote - with no configuration changes. This will happen on all viewers, different computers, Sling mobile, etc. You will get a picture and audio but nothing else, ever.
B - If after A, you try to reconfigure your AV INPUTs and the Sling interface tells you that every country is unsupported....
YOUR SLINGBOX IS UNFIXABLE AND YOU NEED A REPLACEMENT!
If you ever have to call Slingmedia's support for anything but very minor problems, you might as well save yourself the grief, throw your Slingbox away and beat yourself on the head with a hammer. This experience would be less painful and costly then trying to deal with Slingmedia's horrible support system. After one live chat session and two lengthy calls [total of 1 hour holding and 2.5 hours of troubleshooting, etc], I finally got irate enough to tell them that I won't reset the Sling for the 15th time or let them blame my router or network configuration again. What really angers and troubles me is that every time you call, Slingmedia has no system in place to track cases or what troubleshooting steps the previous tech might have done. If you don't get a resolution on the first call, and happen to miss their "call back", get ready to do everything you just did all over again and again, and again. I naively thought that my support experience would be painless... so much for that.
I do systems integration for a living. I specialize in Windows-based IP networks and have been in the field for 11 years, so I'm very technical. I had tried everything in the book BEFORE calling Slingmedia's horrid support. Resets, Firmware upgrades, you name it... I knew short of a miracle that this problem was not workable for the start. I was right. Too bad it took 3.5 hours of Slingmedia's and my time to replace my unit under warranty!
Another dead Slingbox and I'm going to a competitor!
FANTASTIC, INNOVATIVE and WORKING PRODUCT / TERRIBLE, USELESS, STONE-AGE, TROUBLESOME SUPPORT
In closing, let me say that I really love the Slingbox product, so it is with great hesitation that I let the above loose. I hope Sling improves its support! I sincerely hope you do better than I.
Mike Waldron - Slingbox Pro - Time Warner Cable, Los Angeles - Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD - Using SVIDEO, Audio L/R Outputs simultaneously with HDMI