I should start with a candid admission: I'm not a huge television watcher. I catch soccer matches on Fox Soccer Channel, and watch old movies on Turner Classic Movies, but other than that, it's a rare series that catches my attention. I do like Game of Thrones and The Newsroom on HBO and The Walking Dead on AMC, but that's about the extent of my viewing.
Enter Slingbox. The company makes a line of devices that you plug in between your television and your video source and it allows remote viewing and - far more impressive - remote access to the device via a virtual remote control. This means that if you have a DVR, for example, the Slingbox device will let you not only set up future recordings but enjoy previously recorded programming quite literally from anywhere in the world.
What makes the series, and particularly the top-of-the-line Slingbox 500 so darn cool, however, isn't that it lets you view your television and DVR programming while you're on the road, but that it effectively means you can turn any screen in your house into an additional television screen. Want to lay in bed and watch a show? The iPad app works great for that, and iPhones work well too, as you'll see.
I'm pretty convinced that there's no meaningful difference between a movie that I buy in regular DVD format and one that's in Blu-Ray format, other than the price tag. Seems to me that when I watch them, they both look great and my TV tells me when I play a DVD on my Blu-Ray player that it's getting a 1080p signal. So is Blu-Ray just a huge rip-off?
Given the choice, I'd much rather watch DVDs on my Mac with the great free app VLC rather than the lame "DVD Player" that is included with Mac OS X. How the heck do I do that?
Dave, I'd like to know if there's a program available that will let me create a document on the computer and save it to a DVD-ROM disk so that it's playable on a DVD machine? I created a Powerpoint document and saved it on a DVD, but it won't play on my DVD machine, the unit only plays the music. Thank you.