On Sunday night, I got round to setting up the remainder of the Slingbox setup. Up to now the unit has only been hooked up to our regular aerial, and I’ve been using the built in digital tuner, which thanks to our location sometimes produces a watch-able picture.

However, this time I got all the rest of the cables connected up, hooking the S-Video and audio inputs on the box up to the relevant outputs on our Sky+ box. I’ve also set up the pair of IR emitters in a suitable spot to allow the Slingbox to control the Sky+ box.

It was amazingly easy to configure the player, essentially once I’d told the software it was hooked up to a Sky+ box, it merely gives you a screen to power on the box, and then some configuration to measure the response speed of the box compared to the speed of the emitter, and away you go.

What is fantastic is that it really does give you complete control of the box, even from X-Series mobile player – although with the delay it is slightly tortuous controlling the box from the phone. However, on the desktop versions of the player it gives you a software version of the regular Sky+ remote, and it works in much the same way. You can even watch back recorded programmes over the link, and programme in new ones, and power the box on and off remotely too.

So for a business traveller for example, you can set the Sky+ up to record all you favourite programmes, and then sit in a hotel room on the other side of the world, watching the programmes back. If you forget to programme something in, then no problem, just hook up to the box across the internet and you can programme it remotely.

The main downside of course is that, as with video recording off a regular set-top box the Slingbox has full control – so someone at home can’t watch something different. However in that situation, it is a single click to flip the Slingbox back over to the built in tuner, and the person watching the Slingbox has their own pictures. Now if only someone could integrate the Slingbox and Sky+ into one unit that could stream a recording across the internet whilst someone was watching something else locally, now that would be really fantastic!