The most annoying thing is that the hardware for both devices is very good and were I using it at home, the software isn't too bad either. But because I'm using it in a professional environment with routers and VLANs and the like it just won't play ball. While you can add a Slingbox by IP address in the slingplayer application, you can't do the same on the slingcatcher.

I may just admit defeat and just build a tiny fanless Linux box with a hardware MPEG encoder and an SSD and be done with it.

It also appears none of those decoder boxes I mentioned earlier on will simply play arbitrary network video streams. Only stuff off network drives or places like Youtube. If anybody knows of a box you can just stick a URL in and off you go, please let me know. I want to get a bunch of them and just point them at a VLC server to stream live video.