Setting Up My Slingbox Pro to GB-PVR (DVR)

December 21, 2007

OK well my (early) Christmas gift from my loving wife, Cathy, was a Slingbox Pro! We had helped her boss with his Slingbox back in the summer and she remembered how neat I thought it sounded. Also, Cathy was looking for a way that we could both watch recorded TV shows without having to be in our freezing cold basement.

Well she solved that problem with my gift. Yeah yeah, I know it’s not even Christmas Day yet but I accidentally found out she bought the Slingbox when we were looking for an email message on her laptop. This was the first year (in five) that she was going to be able to surprise me and now I found out. Sorry babe!

So anyway, once opening the large outer box and pulling out FEET of brown packaging paper, I found a really cool Slingbox package. They really went all out on the marketing of the box. It’s a nice design and very easy to follow the quick guide for fast and simple setup.

Within 10 minutes of opening the box I had my DVD player broadcasting over my home network to my laptop. The next few hours I spent getting my “build your own” DVR working. I have had GB-PVR (www.gbpvr.com) installed on a old desktop PC for about two years now. It’s an awesome PVR (personal video recorder) and it is FREE! So that makes things even better.

So since my Slingbox doesn’t have any setup information for GB-PVR I needed to look elsewhere for my needs. I knew that connecting the S-Video out from my NVIDIA card to the Slingbox would work just fine. I also knew that the audio out cable would connect to the RCA inputs on the Slingbox. But what I didn’t know was the codes for the Hauppauge PVR -150 remote (the 45 button remote).

I did find a helpful blog post that explained some of the codes for the remote. However, that post was more tuned at controlling his Beyond-TV PVR than GB-PVR but for now it had me up and running and controlling my PVR from upstairs or over the Internet.

I am going to spend some time figuring out how to get the full functionality of the 45-button remote to work with GB-PVR. When I get that working I’ll post another article.

The streaming capabilities of the Slingbox Pro is amazing. When you first fire up a recording or DVD the SlingPlayer Desktop application buffers the video and within seconds you are seeing a crisp, no flutter picture.

The best part of this gift is that my wife and I can now watch all the recorded shows upstairs where it is warmer for her or even in bed. We already caught up on the last three episodes of The Office that she had missed.

Thank you for the gift!