Me and Orb 2.0

At the beginning of the year, I heard about a service called Orb.com.  It allows you to view media from your computer.   Including TV if you have a tuner on your system.

I tried it out a couple of times.  I was able to view my videos and photos but I could never get the tuner online.  If necessity is the mother of invention, Monday Night Football on ESPN was catalyst.  During the week I work in the evenings and at lunchtime, I like to catch a few minutes of the football game.  Since our company has no cable or satellite (ironic since I work in a video post house) it looked like we were all going to have a perpetual blackout on MNF.

Then I thought about Orb again.  Since the last time I used it back earlier in the year, the client software which you install on your media pc, has been updated and the interface has been radically changed.  The proverbial Web 2.0 look.  I reinstalled the new software and discovered I had to have my Beyond TV 4 (DVR software from Snapstream)  up and running in order to get the mpeg2 video stream from my Hauppauge USB 2.0 TV turner to go to Orb.

Low and behold, we got Monday Night Football along with FSN, Clippers, Lakers, etc.  The world was now safe for Democracy.  The video quality is okay.  Considering the video resolution is 320x240, streaming at about 192 kbits/sec.  My cable broadband is rated at most 384K and its more like 200K most of the time.

In the last week or two, I've taken to ripping several of my CDs to 256K mp3s and streaming them over Orb.  They sound pretty good.  Beats carrying CDs around.  The photo feature has always worked solidly.  I can access all 5200 photos I have on my home network.

The best part of Orb is it's free.  Unlike Slingbox which does the same thing but you have to buy the box for about $149 to $199.  Slingbox is for those who don't have a tuner working in concert on their PC at home.  I will go more into detail on a later entry about setting up Orb.