Hava or Slingbox?

[JAG72]

I have been looking into buying a Hava or Slingbox unit for some time now but would like some thoughts on both of them. I have seen a lot of good things being said about the Slingbox but have not seen to much on the Hava unit. Please provide any pro's and con's of these units that you may know. HD is not a major deciding factor right now but having a wireless connection would be nice.

 

[Brewer4]

I have had a Slingbox for almost 2 years. I purchased a Hava Gold about 2 months ago. It never work on my Vista machine. I did get it to work on an XP machine but the software was extremely unstable. I worked with tech support and actually talked to 3 engineers from Hava and I came to the conclusion that the box while having lots of potential, the software was NOT ready for consumer use. Whereas the Slingbox via Vista, XP, PDA, etc. works, works all the time and works very well.

I sent my Hava box back and got a full refund and used that refund to buy a Pro unit. Best decision ever. I was gonna do a write up on the Hava unit but to me it just didnt work so the pro and con analysis was useless in my scenario. Now others may have working Hava units but if I wanted someone to give me advice, I would want them to go Slingbox all the way. Great product. Absolutely fantastic and you cant go wrong with them.

 

[JAG72]

WOW!! Did not know the Hava had that many issues right now.

Another question. How is the picture quality on the feed being sent across the internet? Does a typical cable modem connection of around 256K upload speed have enough to transmit a half way decent picture?

 

[Brewer4]

Your bandwidth will have a major part of the picture quality. 256k will work but will not give you a full screen picture quality. It will only give you about 10-20% screen size that looks ok. That would be with Hava or any other product. The more bandwidth the better the picture. I am not saying 256k wont work or will look like crap, just don't expect it to be the best picture or full screen.

 

[Ramy]

I used Brewer's slingbox and it didn't look that bad. It wasn't great, but it was watchable.

 

[sampatterson]

I have both. I prefer the slingbox for out of the house viewing (when I travel), and the Hava for within the house. Hava picture quality in HD is much better than Sling. The Hava recent software (released in May) improved its stability for me, and it works correctly under Vista MCE. They also finally fixed the 16x9 aspect ratio bugs.