Our Sky+ box has gone “stuck in standby” which means it has a red light on the front and it won’t go green.
You can usually do a software reset by powering it down and then backup whilst holding the “Backup” button in on the unit. But it didn’t help this time and an engineer is on his way later this week.
So no T.V. in the living room. There is a solution though.
Martin’s slingbox is still connected to the Sky box upstairs. It is connected to a Netgear wireless game adapter (basically a one port wired-to-wireless bridge). With Slingplayer running on the living room PC and the settings tuned to LAN speeds, we get very watchable TV and can change channel remotely.
The living room PC is built for low noise so it is difficult to hear it until it has been on for a couple of hours or you’ve been running DirectX games on it. For watching TV it is almost silent.
But I can confirm that TV over slingplayer over wireless over game adapter over composite video over slingbox does actually work very very well.
It also shows just how much resiliency I have accidentally built into my home media setup. I am far too geeky sometimes.
