Come in OZ are you reading me ?


A client had mentioned to me a few weeks ago regarding the provision of remote access to a Sky TV service. A previous attempt to setup a Slingbox had worked locally on his home network but that the final step of remote access had not worked. What interested me though was that the remote access would be for his son in Australia.

An onsite visit was arranged and we quickly set up the infrastructure pieces of the project. A pair of Devolo AV 200 ethernet over power adapters were going to provide the links to the router and the slingbox – and simply required a password to be set to make the network links function. Luckily I had the latest Devolo software from a recent job – but this should be easily downloadable. Once the password were set we go the green light in more ways than one from the Devolo adapters in the form of all three status leds being green and bi-direction pings from the dhcp addresses assigned to a wireless laptop and the slingbox.

We had to download the Slingbox desktop software from their website – and after installing and updating it – we had a final step to update the Slingbox firmware (it had probably been over a year from the original installation so we thought it wise to get the freshest version possible). Once updated we were able to run through the initial setup for the Slingbox – using an email address the clients son had used during the previous install. At the last step however we realised that we would need to setup a NAT rule for the slingbox on port 5001 through the BT Voyager 2110 router used. A few moments spent googling the default password meant that the final stage of the process completed with a successful result from the installation software telling us we had remote access.

Plugging in the video output of the sky box – this is via a passthrough scart adapter supplied with the Slingbox – into the correct ports on the slingbox and aligning the IR stalks that sit in front of the slingbox to allow remote channel control and we were ready for the first test. Selecting the Sky box in the configuration page and switching on the channel with the on screen remote resulted in us seeing a BBC cartoon called OOglies on an onscreen window. Success.

We called our remote viewer via Skype to find our if they were ready for a test – since they already had the Slingbox Desktop software on their laptop and were told that they had been briefly connected and had seen a strange cartoon !!! We disconnected our local session and were immediately rewarded with confirmation that the remote playback and control of the Sky box was well and truly working- we could hear it over the Skype link anyway !! Latency and picture quality were not reported as problems so just shows how much better the infrastructure has become.

So we finished this project with a happy remote user – able to watch and record on SKY and a happy client who may want to see Strictly Come Dancing when they visit Australia next month.

PS

Sorry Graeme – the Develos are now most definitely in use. No luck in this case 🙂