So I got my 922 today. If you've been around dish DVRs you may remember me as the guy that provided a lot of info upgrading the 7100/7200 units.
I'll echo what a lot of people have said that turning the unit off and letting it sit for a while will resolve some of the immediate issues and will take you from "There was a problem communicating" to a more functional state. How functional will depend upon your network setup.
There have been some questions about if the video stream goes up to sling's servers and back down before viewing if you're using a computer in your house. The answer is, it depends.
Based on my testing the following conditions need to happen for it to just traverse only your local network:
a) The 922 and the machine you are trying to watch it on MUST be on the same subnet. If you're trying to use a machine connected to your local network via WiFi it may very well not be on the same subnet depending upon how your network is configured. You can verify that both machines are on the same subnet by gathering the ipaddress and subnet from the 922. You can get this information by pressing the blue shortcut key on your remote. Now find your ip on your computer (varies by OS but you should be able to find it in your network config). Take this information and go to:
Online IP Subnet Calculator < SAMURAJ-cz.com Put in the ip and subnet of the 922. The website will return a lot of information but the important one is the "Host Addresses" If your ip address on your computer is in the range then both machines are on the same subnet.
b) The 922 will try to connect to the client machine directly if they are in the same subnet. If you have a firewall on your client machine it will very likely disrupt this connection. Many "personal" firewalls are configured to prompt when an application tries to listen for incoming connections. OS X's built in firewall behaves this way, you may see a prompt pop up very quickly offering you a chance to allow it to do this. But in the case of the Mac, the sling software gives up on this local connection quickly and the prompt closes before you can have a chance to say yes.
Even if you have both machines on the same subnet and there is no firewall interrupting the connection, you may not get a local connection. As I said above, the software gives up quickly on the local connection. I've found that getting that local connection can be hit or miss. If it doesn't get that local connection it will fall back to sending to slings servers and then coming back to you from there.
For those with firewalls the question of ports comes up, since some firewalls are configured simply by the port number. As far as I can tell the port number used is random. There are no consistent set of ports that you can easily configure your firewall to recognize and ok. However, you can configure your firewall to simply allow all connections incoming from your 922. You may be able to configure your DHCP server (included in your router in most cases) to always give the 922 a specific address and then set that address as allowed to everything.
As I play with the slingloaded feature I'll probably get better information as I go.
