ORB
Came across orb.com today and wow... this thing is really cool. Its early days still but some initial testing today has been quite impressive. Basically ORB lets you stream your media from your home to devices connected to the internet. OK.. so here's what’s cool about
- Streaming movies / music / pics over the internet
- Very easy to set up
- Works with mobile devices as well as PCs
- Its free :)
You can grab the software from www.orb.com. I installed it on a Windows XP machine. Spec requirements are quite high due to the video conversion that is going on to ensure that its stepping down the video depending on what connection that you have. Once its installed it will look in your my documents folder for any media and add them to your list. You can add additional folders if you store your media elsewhere.
To get Access to the media you login to orb from another machine. It will display all your content in a web browser and you can browse through and once you find what you want you hit the play button and it will start to detect your connection speed and then start streaming.
I got a couple of friends to test it and they all said it worked. I didn’t even have to configure my firewall, it uses a proxy rather than making direct connects.
I also tried it to my windows media phone. That worked fine as well with no messing. Only issue I had was that Windows media player wouldn’t play the video in full screen... but it never does.. so decided to change the default media program with a reg hack
I changed
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shell\Rai\:WMPLAYER
change String 1
from wmplayer.exe
to
"\Program Files\TCPMP\player.exe"
or
"\Storage Card\Program Files\TCPMP\player.exe" if its installed on SD.
to get it to use TCPMP as the default player.
I’ll try and add some more detail another time but I have been refitting my TV room today and run out of time tonight.