Hi everyone, thanks for clicking.

 In early August I moved into an apartment complex at the university I attend. The great thing is that the utilities, TV and internet are all included in the rent, the bad thing is that I hate the TV lineup. I've never had anything besides DirecTV and AT&T U-Verse at my house, so it's foreign for me to have no program guide and have so few channels that are worth watching. I'm far from spoiled, but dammit, I like having options.

Since at my mom's house she has AT&T U-Verse with one of the higher tier packages, I need assistance in finding out if buying a Slingbox will work.

There's still a U-Verse receiver in my room, so first I would hook up a Slingbox to that. Then, from what I understand, all I do is log on to my computer and I can watch TV. Now, here is where it may get a little complicated.

I don't want to have to watch TV on my computer. It's a great option and I'm sure I'd use it plenty - I have a two monitor setup in my computer room, so the second monitor would basically be a slingbox TV for whenever I'm not using both screens. However, the main thing that I want to be able to do is watch TV downstairs in my living room on the TV I have in there. I've done a little reading about this SlingCatcher thing, and while I'm sure it's a pretty cool device, it seems that the same thing could be accomplished with a cheap computer and a couple cables. So, the setup would be something like

AT&T U-Verse Receiver --> Slingbox --> Internet --> Computer --> TV. I imagine that with a decent video card and a good amount of memory, it would work without any setbacks.

 Now, I have a few questions that I'd be EXTREMELY thankful if someone could answer them.

1) Which Slingbox would be best for this? I've been looking at the Slingbox AV as that seems to be the right pick, but is there another model I'm not familiar with that would give me better results?

2) Will the picture be of a decent quality, or will it be crap? It's cable internet here, and outside of maybe a couple of slowdowns a week, it's extremely fast. The internet at my house is obviously AT&T DSL, but it's got a pretty decent upstream speed and is generally very fast. Will I notice a lot of pixelation or artifacts on a large screen? The TV in my living room is a 55" HDTV I bought a little over a year and a half ago.

3) Is running an S-Video and audio cable from my computer the best setup, or is there some other method I'm missing? I'd rather not spend $300 on a SlingCatcher - in fact, I can't - but it seems like connecting a computer to the TV and watching it like that wouldn't cause any problems, so long as Slingbox doesn't have some weird parameters that prevent that.

 Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me, I'm hoping this idea is sound, but any feedback or advice you guys can provide me with would be extremely appreciated.