Vulkano Flow: Sub-$100 HDTV Place-Shifter

07.07.2011
If you've ever spent any time channel surfing in a hotel room, chances are you'll immediately see the appeal of place-shifting technology, which allows you to watch your home TV programs remotely by streaming them over the Internet to a PC, Mac, or smartphone. One of Monsoon Multimedia's latest offerings in this category, the , costs about $100 (as of 7/7/2011), supports high-def video, and works pretty well if your remote broadband connection meets its modest bandwidth demands. But you have to accept some image quality compromises, and its controls for remote access generally work extremely slowly.

Like the more full-featured (and pricey) I reviewed earlier this year, the Flow works by intercepting the video stream that travels between your cable or satellite box and your , and making it available via the Internet to player software that you can download and install on a PC, Mac, smartphone, or tablet. The Mac and PC players are free, but you have to pay $13 for the mobile device apps, which previously were also free and apparently now subsidize the low price of the Flow.

The main drawback of this scheme is that most current HD cable or satellite boxes connect to HDTVs via an HDMI cable, which securely delivers both high-def digital video and 5.1 or 7.1 audio, too. Copy-protection technology doesn't allow an unauthorized third-party device such as a Vulkano to grab a copy of the digital signal en route to your set. So the best a Vulkano can do is to use the set-top box's analog outputs, which don't have those security issues but also can't deliver the pristine quality of the digital video signal. For audio, meanwhile, the Vulkano can only use the box's analog stereo outputs--forget 5.1, let alone 7.1.

This isn't ideal, but on a small smartphone or notebook display, the video quality issues are less apparent than they would be on a big HDTV screen.

Like its predecessors, the Vulkano Flow is a black, keyboard-sized slab. It comes with cables to connect to a set-top box's analog outputs for either component or composite video, and for stereo audio. Component video, which uses three separate cables, delivers the best quality analog connection; composite video carries all the image info on a single cable and isn't quite as good.

You must provide your own cables for connecting the Flow to the HDTV. The quick setup guide blithely declares that you can use the same cables you previously used to connect the set-top box directly to the TV, but if you have been using an HDMI cable, you can't do this--the Flow has no HDMI port (as did the Deluxe). So you're on your own for finding another set of analog cables that match the ones you use to connect the Flow to the set-top box (the instructions say the two sets of cables must be the same).