Why

If you travel a lot, or live abroad, then watching your "home" TV is very important.
There are a number of technologies available, and being a self-confessed geek, I've tried most of them. Some with more sucess than others.

How

Currently I use a combination of 3 different technologies, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Each of these technologies requires a device to be placed in the country that you wish to watch TV from, for the proxy servers you can rent a commercial service. As they use the internet to transfer the picture data to your remote machine, having a good uplink is important (in the UK I use an O2 connection to an unbundled exchange which is rated at 1.3Mbps uplink)

Device	Info	What is it?	Pros	Cons
Slingmedia Slingbox	http://www.slingbox.com/	Some have a built in tuner, other just have analogue in. It encodes the input and streams it over the internet. It has a wide range of virtual remote controls, and if you have a compatible device (maybe a PVR) then the virtual remote will send the commands to the sling box, which uses a set of IR LEDs to send then to a connected box. I have a Slingbox Solo with a Sagem PVR62160T. (Used to have the Slingbox classic with DVB-T tuner)	Easy to set up Good software support Software adjusts picture quality depending on bandwidth available Cheap (around £100)	Picture quality isn't great for live sports (often drops to 320x240 even with 800Kbps) Needs a PVR connected if you're in a different time zone
Dream Media	http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/en	A range of Satellite/Cable and DVB tuners and PVRs with open source Linux software and an ethernet port I have the dm600-t (See my set-up guide).	Good software software support Great functionality Best picture quality for non-live viewing	Need to be an expert to set-up Only single tuner (unless you pay a lot more) Expensive (£175 + HDD)
A proxy server	http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=507202	Accessing the various TV company download services via a UK IP address I use my Dreambox as a proxy server	BBC Easy to set up Cheap (Buy a box for around £100 or pay £20 per year) Live and Catch up service	Other channels hard to set up Live streaming often struggles Often a lag between program broadcast and availibility

Notes:

I have the Dreambox configured to record certain series, and at midnight each day it uploads to a local server so that I can watch at my leisure. This give full broadcast quality pictures, but takes 4hours per hour of program to download
I use the slingbox to watch live TV, or for things I don't worry about the quality of.
I use the proxy server for the catch up services, where I've missed recording something, and for live BBC radio.

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This page was lasted updated on Tuesday, 19-Oct-2010 08:09:11 BST
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