Slingbox Pro HD On the Way

• January 4th, 2008 | Streaming Video

Slingbox, the grand-daddy of the streaming media has finally gone HD. What more could you want from a machine that streams your media from your home to your favorite portable devices? The Slingbox, for anyone who’s not in the know, is a device that’s sort of like you in device-form. It controls your video recording and playback decks. From there, software on your laptop, tells your Slingbox to tell your VCR, DVD player, DVR (or other media-playing device) to play. The video plays into your Slingbox across it’s Ethernet connection out onto the Internet where your laptop, PDA or other Sling-enabled device can pick it up (BlackBerry support coming soon). This means that where ever you are on the planet, if you can get to a wifi connection you can watch your home video.

Until recently, the Slingbox couldn’t do High-Definition–with the new Slingbox Pro HD, that has changed. The Pro HD, which will be the high-end of the Slingbox line–when it drops later this year–allows you to connect to four different media sources featuring an HD input, coax, regular video-ins, and S-Video, of course. One wonders if the analog cable tuner in the current Slingbox Pro will be available in the Slingbox Pro HD what with the American change-over to permanent digital TV signals coming in 2009. With any luck (or thought), the Pro HD will have a digital cable tuner.