Can I use my computers and 211 on the same subnet to watch recorded programs on 722k?

gireesh said:

I have a 722k and two 211, and multiple computers on a CAT5e/CAT6 network with a gigabit router.

I have very little need to access my DVR when I am not on the above network.

I have three questions:

(1) Do I need a Sling Adapter to Stream video locally to my computers?
(2) Is viewing recorded content on the 722k from 211 possible at all?
(3) Is DishOnline smart enough to recognize that my 722k and my computer are on the same subnet and not route traffic through my internet gateway and back to my subnet?

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1. Yes
2. No
3. No, I wish.

I'm pretty sure that if you are watching your 722k with a Sling Adapter on your local network it is not going out over your internet connection and back in. The video stream doesn't route through the Dish servers, it's a direct connection between your PC and the 722k. If it is routing outside of your local network, then there is a network configuration problem with your network or with your ISP's network.

You can watch output from the 722 on the TV hooked up to the 211 in SD. But in order to do that you need to connect the coax from TV2 output to the antenna in of the TV. Depending on how your 211 is connected to it's TV you just have to switch input mode from HDMI or component to antenna. By passing the 211. In my crazy set up, I have a TV downstairs hooked up to an a/b switch. One side is TV2 output, the other to super basic cable, Since that TV is set up for cable in, I receive TV2 output on 116. I also have the 722 hooked up to an old vcr via the TV2 composite outputs. I then ran the vcr coax out under the floor to a splitter that feeds a sd lcd tv in the kitchen and my 19 inch hdtv next to the computer. Like the TV downstairs, it has an a/b switch for the cable and the feed from the 722. The tv is also hooked up to my 211 via hdmi. The 211 is also connected via coax to a tv hdtv in the bedroom. I have a Radio Shack IR wireless remote extender in the bedroom to control the 211 remotely. One of these days, I'm going to look into splitting the feed to TV2 downstairs and use that to feed the kitchen and computer room tv and getting rid of the vcr..

dwarren2 said:

I also have the 722 hooked up to an old vcr via the TV2 composite outputs.

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This is currently in second place on my list of this month's complex solutions to simple problems.

Do your SD TVs not handle VHF channels and that's why you're using the VCR?

harshness said:

This is currently in second place on my list of this month's complex solutions to simple problems.

Do your SD TVs not handle VHF channels and that's why you're using the VCR?

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Only the LCD in the kitchen is SD. The one enxt to the computer is HD and it's is hooked up to the 211 via hdmi. I was using the coax to watch TV2 dvr output from the 722 since I had not added a ehd to the 211. Did that this week. But the layout was the easiest. The vcr was already in place. I did this wiring years ago. That's why I said that one of these days I put a splitter on the TV2 output from the 722 and use that to feed the tv's. The system worked. My wife could watchsomething dvr'd in the living room and I could watch something else in the computer room or I could watch TV2 while working in the kitchen.

So FYI
1) there is *some* back channel communication to Dish/Sling even if you're locally watching the video from a SlingAdapter (some .... defined as on the order of a 1k or so administrivia)

2) I've not been overly impressed with the SlingAdapter, aside from the DVR data and lousy website application (sling adapter doesn't use standalone applications, its a web based player) ....I've wished I'd only gotten *one* of the Sling Adapters, and then tried the Sling Box Pro ... the differences in ability would have made up for the cost difference (3 or 4 inputs to the Sling Box, so you can connect to your DVD/Bluray, etc) and its possible the Sling Box might do better at encryption & streaming, since it only has to sample and encrypt, not decrypt, resample, encrypt, then stream ...

so if cost and simplicity are motivating you, the sling adapter is fine, know however there are issues, and regardless so long as you have gigE available to each of your devices (inside) then you shouldn't see any internal network problems.

TG2 said:

2) and its possible the Sling Box might do better at encryption & streaming, since it only has to sample and encrypt, not decrypt, resample, encrypt, then stream ...

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I seriously doubt that encryption is in play. The bonus to all of this is that the SlingAdapter gets a look at the digital version of the signal as opposed to the analog version that the conventional Slingboxen see.

TG2 said:

So FYI
1) there is *some* back channel communication to Dish/Sling even if you're locally watching the video from a SlingAdapter (some .... defined as on the order of a 1k or so administrivia)

2) I've not been overly impressed with the SlingAdapter, aside from the DVR data and lousy website application (sling adapter doesn't use standalone applications, its a web based player) ....I've wished I'd only gotten *one* of the Sling Adapters, and then tried the Sling Box Pro ... the differences in ability would have made up for the cost difference (3 or 4 inputs to the Sling Box, so you can connect to your DVD/Bluray, etc) and its possible the Sling Box might do better at encryption & streaming, since it only has to sample and encrypt, not decrypt, resample, encrypt, then stream ...

so if cost and simplicity are motivating you, the sling adapter is fine, know however there are issues, and regardless so long as you have gigE available to each of your devices (inside) then you shouldn't see any internal network problems.

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With a Slingbox OR a Sling Adapter, the receiver is still decrypting before sending the video to the Sling. The difference between the Slingbox and Adapter is that the Sling Adapter gets the raw video bits from the receiver, where the Slingbox has to get the analog video from the receivers outputs and perform an analog to digital conversion. From a theoretical standpoint, the Sling Adapter is a much much better solution. However, the 722 seems to be a bit overworked, so some of the 'administrative' tasks as you put it have issues and then it disconnects, reboots the receiver, etc. The idea is superb, but the execution is classic Dish

JosephB said:

With a Slingbox OR a Sling Adapter, the receiver is still decrypting before sending the video to the Sling. The difference between the Slingbox and Adapter is that the Sling Adapter gets the raw video bits from the receiver, where the Slingbox has to get the analog video from the receivers outputs and perform an analog to digital conversion. From a theoretical standpoint, the Sling Adapter is a much much better solution. However, the 722 seems to be a bit overworked, so some of the 'administrative' tasks as you put it have issues and then it disconnects, reboots the receiver, etc. The idea is superb, but the execution is classic Dish

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The SlingBox ... maybe it doesn't have to re-encrypt ... if someone knew for sure check in ... but it would seem the main problem with a product like either sling ... is that there would be a push from the media/content owners to have DRM in control of the output. To have DRM you have to have some form of encryption.

I'd rather they (dish/sling/whomever) create a module, presuming the module could get local buss connections rather than the chain of stuff it goes through now..
ie. minimally you have to get the recording un-encrypted from drive, streamed to USB, transcoded (proper), back through USB to Ethernet.

Now my thinking was, if the feed coming out the eithernet has no encryption .. then it means anyone could get in-between and pull the data out, having a fairly high quality digital stream with which to do bad things with, and that's why I think its not happening without reencryption (of some form).

and I did just find this -- Slingbox Encryption Upgrade Infuriates Customers, Developer | News & Opinion | PCMag.com -- which says that Sling added encryption (page says without disclosing why) but I would bet it was forced to or probably face litigation in court for rebroadcasting content without DRM.

I'd bet there are more articles about that (encrypting stream) but I've spent more time looking already plus the picture of which I had to find some alternative to the crap they put on there for heatsink conduction ... in the picture if you see the upper right corner, the memory chips still have this stuff on them, its almost foamish but not sure, and it barely touches the backplate where it seems clear they intended it to for heat dispersement ... that chip (Magnum's DX6225-CBG) is low power but the adapter still feels warm when its running (2.5 Watts listed but I wonder how much heat that really is).

Anyway, If it were module based, you might expect to cut out the USB/USB transport ... even though USB is 400+Megs throughput, it would be half that when used for bidirectional communication - remember the stream has to go back to the 722k to get to the ethernet port - and maybe less than half the max speed to allow for timing, retransmit, etc ...

so without the USB you'd have less "going on" and still be able to have much of the same chips used. That also presumes the modules that plug in the back of the 722 get some form of system buss access. I'm also pretty sure they could have added more memory to the card (picture below) maybe helping when the 722k might be busy, but a module in the OTA receiver bay, would have even more room to operate disipate heat, etc.


The surprising thing, is that it says the chip itself is supposedly able to do two 1080i streams at the same time and quote "faster than real-time transcode for download-to-mobile applications". So maybe the real bottleneck is that they are pushing the limits of the 722k and find the performance "acceptible" (I've issues with audio only streams from the box, and have seen other glitches which I equate to the box, the network is wide open for the sling to my pc, and maxes at 8 to 9 megs (though I may have see it hit 12 one time I'm not sure).

I believe you (TG2) are correct, and thanks for the pic! I always wondered what was in there. The Adapter decrypts, transcodes, and re-encrypts so that an unencrypted stream is not available on the USB bus. Not sure but I believe the same encryption is going on when the stream exits the network jack. In any case the network stream is likewise encrypted. (This is why I own a Hava Platinum rather than a Slingbox Solo.) The Sling Adapter does it's magic entirely in the digital domain, so in principle it could do so with better quality than an external Slingbox.

External devices rely on the receiver to decrypt the satellite signal (unless coming from disk) and convert to analog. Then this analog video signal is captured, converted, and encrypted again for network streaming.

TG2, I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say, but the fact remains that on paper, an integrated solution is better. The way an external slingbox works is that it takes an analog video signal, converts it to digital, compresses it, encrypts it, and then streams it out. An integrated sling..whether a 722/ adapter or 922, works by sending a decrypted but still digital stream of bits to a separate module that then re-encodes it at a lower bitrate and then encrypts it and finally sends it back to the box to be dealt with appropriately (IE: sent out via Ethernet). Having the Sling internal should result in better picture quality because you remove a digital to analog back to digital conversion chain.

The problem with the integrated solution is that especially in the case of the 722, it's busy doing other things. So, the administrative tasks of the Slingbox that would be taken care of by an external box have to be taken care of by the 722's CPU (network connections, channel changes, etc). I'm pretty sure, however, that the Sling Adapter is sending the stream already encrypted back to the box over USB, so Sling Adapter or Slingbox, it probably wouldn't make a difference on the encryption point.

I think part of the bottle neck is the double path on the USB. While USB2 is 400 ~ 480 Mbit, in reality you would probably see 200Mbit max. ie. you're both sending data out and receiving data back from the USB, and so you take the max and divide by 2. Then there's USB overhead (wiki says 10 to 15%, but I didn't try to confirm that).

If the module were made into something like the OTA module that goes into the module bay on a 722k ... then you'd have the device getting local buss access to the data.

First in that, means that you eliminate queue to USB port, and *if* the data going to the USB port requires another encryption step, then you eliminate that one as well, since a device "internal" to the 722 would not have its datalines be easily intercepted. And then the reverse is also the case, once the module has done its transcoding, you have the *exit* path which encrypts and drops it out the ethernet port.

So that would be more integrated in the digital side of things.


Now ... as to the abilities of internal or external devices.. Sling Box Pro/HD takes component inputs.. so if you're taking a clean component output, and going into a slingbox ... that would still do fairly nicely since we're talking 2 to 3 foot cables, not 50 foot or through 4 different devices and since Component Video is upto 1080p the amount of noise from digital to analog and back should be low (very)

... additionally, as an external box, you're no longer using the one box for everything *but* the transcode ... and not doing it all at the cheapest cost possible, you're doing two boxes, one that's best designed for output of the sat signal, one that's designed to take in a signal and output the stream.

Either done poorly leads to an over all failure to meet expectations never mind impressing or exceeding expectations.

right now, in my mind, short of running a cable directly between my 722k and my pc, there's nothing else that could be causing the audio and video anomolies (in another thread I've posted screen captures showing my network data path can handle 20+ megs) yet even at 8 megs the video & audio has variations that really just should not be there. The anomolies coupled with other issues that we *know* are slingadapter/722 related, suggests that Dish/sling really do need to either get their code in gear, or come out with a better adapter.

TG2 said:

I think part of the bottle neck is the double path on the USB. While USB2 is 400 ~ 480 Mbit, in reality you would probably see 200Mbit max. ie. you're both sending data out and receiving data back from the USB, and so you take the max and divide by 2. Then there's USB overhead (wiki says 10 to 15%, but I didn't try to confirm that).

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You might rationalize this, but you would be ignoring that many dual OTA tuner setups (including DIRECTV's AM21 OTA add-on box) effectively use USB to transfer two channels.

My Sling never trasnfers data at more tha 4mbit, even when on my local network. IIRC the max bandwidth of a satellite transponder is in the 50mbit range, and all channels are way less than that. An ATSC channel is at max 19.8mbit. In other words, USB2 is more than enough to move two video streams. The problems arise from CPU bottlenecks in the 722.

JosephB said:

My Sling never trasnfers data at more tha 4mbit, even when on my local network. IIRC the max bandwidth of a satellite transponder is in the 50mbit range, and all channels are way less than that. An ATSC channel is at max 19.8mbit. In other words, USB2 is more than enough to move two video streams. The problems arise from CPU bottlenecks in the 722.

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Well the other side of this.. is the compression/decompression codecs used. Even though 4Mbit is all you saw from the sling box, was the quality as good or better than the SlingAdapter? and is the amount of data moved comprable?

Case in point ... I've a copy of Katy Perry's "Firework" video (youtube), its 1080p and just 7 second shy of 4 minutes. Its 94 megs. ... So lets assume 4mins = 100 meg .... or 25 megs per minute.

If we took a one hour video .... 25 M/m x 60 min = 1.5 G (approx)

the average of some of my DVR events moved to external hard drive go from 1.x gigs to 2.3 gigs

So maybe dish's downlink on any given channel is at about that rate 25meg/min ... then why isn't Dish's 1080i as clear, and why isn't its data moved as efficiently from the box in the next room, as that 1080p video from Youtube?

A quick live-stream test I got this...

Mon Feb 28 14:05:32 UTC 2011
Mon Feb 28 14:09:50 UTC 2011

RX bytes:451909504 (430.9 MiB) TX bytes:3187298936 (2.9 GiB)
RX bytes:728595913 (694.8 MiB) TX bytes:3193328354 (2.9 GiB)

Bytes: 277,505,409
Time : 4m 18s // 258sec
Approx: 64 MBytes / Min ...

This is nearly THREE times the amount of data moved from Youtube and Youtube's video is 1080p while the live video is from the "better" setting on the dish player app which I'd say is fairly high, but not 1080p, and if you can hear the "warble" in the audio at times, you know there must be something not so great in the video stream but the human eye can't detect it as easily as the ear does the audio.


I'm sure there's overhead, but not 3 times as much, and certainly not so that there would be 3 times as much data. After having run that test ... I'm convinced that Dish's codecs are just sh*t and that if they'd apply their resources in the right direction they'd probably half their amount of required transponders, saving them money, and by chance being able to offer more value (more channel space, less drive space waste on a DVR, etc)

You're confusing a lot of stuff here. First off, the 4mbit I quoted was from my Sling Adapter, not Sling Box, so it's only going at 4mbit from the 722. Also, megabyte != megabit. And finally comparing Youtube to Dish is like comparing apples to oranges.

JosephB said:

You're confusing a lot of stuff here. First off, the 4mbit I quoted was from my Sling Adapter, not Sling Box, so it's only going at 4mbit from the 722. Also, megabyte != megabit. And finally comparing Youtube to Dish is like comparing apples to oranges.

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I didn't confuse megabyte and megabit those are real numbers ... I added the commas to show that it moved 277 megabytes of data the RX Bytes / TX Bytes ... its in the line there.. "bytes" not bits

now 4 megabit from your Sling Adapter.. are you only using it on the "Good" setting? I'm moving 8 megabits per second across the network on the "Better" setting ... and that's confirmed both with the sling player app from the dish website, as well as monitored bandwidth through the router. (slightly more complex network here than your average home).

As to the Youtube / Dish comparison .. apples and oranges are both fruits right?

Youtube .. video across ethernet
SlingAdapter ... video across ethernet

more like comparing Red Delicious and Golden Delicious Apples.

Yes, I over simplify, and agree that its far more intensive with "live" streams than fixed length stored content and streams, but three times the level of data? suggestively wasteful of limited resources regardless.

For DISH to say its doing its best, would be like the audiophile saying there can be no compromise for Vinyl when 256k MP3's at least reproduce 90% or more the quality that our ears can discern, and given other opinions of Dish's HD qualities, I think 80% would probably describe dish best, if that.