Sling Box

A lot of this is explained on their website...

You feed it a signal (Coax, s-video, or rca), and it then allows you to see that signal. If you wanted LIVE only, you could set it up with your cable input, and then put the IR emitter (allows slingbox to change channels on something that access IR, i.e. has a remote) on your cable box, your tv, or (here is the cool part) your PVR.

So, if you say, put together a Tivo or a MythTV box (open source, knoppmyth is your friend) and had slingbox connected as the output of the PVR (personal video recorded), and the IR Emitter setup on the PVR, then you could control from Ireland either LiveTV or recorded programs through the PVR.
If you set this up in a closet, feeding your cable-in and Network cables to the location, you could piggy back this off of your parents signal without changing anything about thier setup. Neat huh?

You can get even fancier if you wanted to, but that requires knowing specifically what hardware you are using. IMO, if it was a KnoppMyth created MythTV PVR, I'd setup their router so I could get access to the web interface and PuttY of the DVR, just in case it locks up and you need command line access to restart it. THe web interface would allow you to program it without loading the slingbox (KISS, Keep it Simple Stupid).

Ok, enough typing.

It's real time. It takes an input from a video source, converts it to a stream, and allows the client (Windows only) to view the stream. One thing to keep in mind is that this thing has no tuner, so your parents would have to be watching the game for you to watch it (or at least have a TV tuned to the game and have the slingbox connected to that).

You can simulate "on-demand" by hooking the slingbox to something like a Tivo. With the IR blaster on the slingbox you can control the Tivo (or a TV for that matter) remotely. At least that's how I understand it.

I see how you could do this, but I'm curious about how well this works in reality over the internet. Most cable/DSL connections only have 128-256 Kbps upstream. Will that be enough for streaming a TV signal? And the hops from Canada to Ireland would be sort of interesting, too, as all the packets have to end up on time and in order.

Does anybody in Canada put any of the games up on bittorrent? If so, that would be the easiest way out. And, btw, the broadcasters would probably say that you are infringing on their "content creator rights" by using the slingbox anyway.

You can get lot of info on this website www.mobilephones-info.com/SlingBox.htm