Leopard, Slingbox, and College

Im pretty much in the boat as you. I bought a slingbox (originally for my motorola q) and installed it on leopard. It works flawlessly. I don't know which version of the slingbox you have, but I have the original (the silver and red one). The quality is decent if I use a medium size screen. if I try to maximize it, it gets pretty blurry. I don't think the tv resolution was made for a computer. But it is great to watch the programming that the basic college cable gives you. I actually use it in its own space to watch the new fox business network.

http://www.google.com/search?q=slingbox leopard

It doesn't look very good. Does your university have a bandwidth quota? The last time I checked mine had a 3 GB one per 24 period.

Then again I don't live in the dorms. I might have to ask a student.

callmemike20 said:

...I actually use it in its own space to watch the new fox business network.

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eEK! 😱

Eidorian said:

http://www.google.com/search?q=slingbox leopard

It doesn't look very good. Does your university have a bandwidth quota? The last time I checked mine had a 3 GB one per 24 period.

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Yea, thats a good point. I would recommend checking into that as well. My friend, who goes to the University of Illinois, got his internet connection severely limited because of his high bandwidth usage. My college, depaul, however, does not have a quota (that I know of). I'm usually getting around 300Kbps.

callmemike20 said:

Yea, thats a good point. I would recommend checking into that as well. My friend, who goes to the University of Illinois, got his internet connection severely limited because of his high bandwidth usage. My college, depaul, however, does not have a quota (that I know of). I'm usually getting around 300Kbps.

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Can you elaborate more on this?

At my office desk I get 4-7 MB/s down and around 2 MB/s upstream. Mind you this is only a small chunk of the overall pipe. Don't forget to add 30,000 students into that mix when they're here.

Eidorian said:

Can you elaborate more on this?

At my office desk I get 4-7 MB/s down and around 2 MB/s upstream. Mind you this is only a small chunk of the overall pipe. Don't forget to add 30,000 students into that mix when they're here.

Click to expand...

I actually don't fully understand this stuff. In my picture, you can see that I am streaming at about 3000Kbps while at home connected by ethernet to my home network (the same network as my slingbox). When in school, that number usually caps at about 300Kbps. If I try to manually increase the maximum, i get a lot of choppy video and it never fully optimizes. Now this number is also determined by you internet connection at home. If you only get 512kbps up then that is the max rate you can upload that video to the internet for streaming (as I understand it). So even if you have a 4-7MB/s down, you will not get that full stream because the sender cannot send it that fast. It's like when you download something from the internet. It never goes as fast as your download speed.

If I am wrong, someone please correct me. I am pretty knowledgeable with computers (a little new to macs), but this networking stuff confuses me sometimes.

callmemike20 said:

I actually don't fully understand this stuff. In my picture, you can see that I am streaming at about 3000Kbps while at home connected by ethernet to my home network (the same network as my slingbox). When in school, that number usually caps at about 300Kbps. If I try to manually increase the maximum, i get a lot of choppy video and it never fully optimizes. Now this number is also determined by you internet connection at home. If you only get 512kbps up then that is the max rate you can upload that video to the internet for streaming (as I understand it). So even if you have a 4-7MB/s down, you will not get that full stream because the sender cannot send it that fast. It's like when you download something from the internet. It never goes as fast as your download speed.

If I am wrong, someone please correct me. I am pretty knowledgeable with computers (a little new to macs), but this networking stuff confuses me sometimes.

Click to expand...

You have it correct. At 300 kbps Slingbox uses a higher compression rate then at 3000 kbps to stream the video. If you can't send it out at that higher rate you're only going to get choppy video on the receiving end.

It looks like your school might be enforcing a speed limit instead of a bandwidth quota.