Slingbox Solo Setup

I bought a Slingbox Solo yesterday so I can watch Canadian Olympic Coverage in the US.  More importantly I bought it so I can watch the Team Canada hockey games that are not televised in the US.  A Slingbox is a device that allows you to remotely view a cable, satellite or PVR program from an Internet-enabled computer with a  broadband Internet connection.  I plan to have the Slingbox located in Canada and stream it to my house in the US.

I went though the setup of the Slingbox last night and it wasn't exactly straight forward.  I wouldn't recommend it for the light-hearted.  It doesn't come with an instruction manual, which seems pretty typical for tech devices today.  I wasn't really too concerned with this since I don't usually use manuals, unless I absolutely need them.  After some tweaks and playing around with port forwarding settings on my firewall I was able to get it working.

My setup went as follows.  

1) Plug the ethernet cable into the Slingbox and the other end into one of the open ports on my Actiontec MI424WR router (yes the Verizon FIOS POS)

2) Plug the audio/video cables (component, composite or s-video) into the IN audio/video ports of the Slingbox, plug the other end of the cables into the OUT ports of your digital receiver.

3) Plug the AC adapter barrel into the Slingbox and the other end into an AC sources.

4) Wait for the Slingbox to fire-up.  Once it boots-up the 2 lights on the front of the front of the Slingbox should be solid red.

5) Once this is complete, your router should assign it an IP via DHCP.  You can verify this by logging into your router and noting the IP that was assigned.

6) Also make sure to enable UPnP on your router so the Slingbox can be easily discovered.

7) Setup port forwarding on your router, so that your Slingbox can use port 5001, using TCP.  5001 is the Slingbox default, but you can configure the Slingbox to use whatever port you would like.

8) Once I verified that my port forwarding worked I downloaded and installed the SlingPlayer software.  Note: I found that the Mac version of the software seems to be a lot different then the Windows version.

9) Once you install the software it will look for your Slingbox on the network.  If all goes well it should detect your it and run you through a setup wizard that will ensure the Slingbox TCP port is open and setup your remote control.
10) Once the setup wizard is complete.... voila!  You should be able to view whatever is being streamed from your receiver.