Orb opens up iPhone [and iTouch]

"I know, let's give subscribers access to their home music
collections - and charge nothing for it!" I noticed this announcment
about Orb a few minutes ago.

Orb opens up iPhone
By chrissyboy, posted 1 hour ago

Orb is expected to announce that it's supporting Apple's iPhone and
iPod Touch in the next few days. Orb provides access to your playlists
and songs on your home PC (as well as photos, videos and TV) from
anywhere. It's Sling without the hardware, with many users simply
using it to access their home music collections at work.

On the iPhone and Touch, Orb is accessed through the browser. It
wasn't as straightforward as that, however, since Apple stealthily
blocks applications that use RTSP, the standard mobile streaming
protocol. It will deliver your streams in MP4 instead.

Why is this stealthy software company so significant? Well, for
starters, it provides the kind of obvious-in-hindsight service that IP
protocols are all about. Can you imagine a telco waking up one
morning, thinking: "I know, let's give subscribers access to their
home music collections - and charge nothing for it!"

"Place-shifting" offers an interesting contrast to the two great hypes
du jour: User Generated Content with its mantra of "the user is in
control", and "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Both have a grain of
truth about them, but supporters do tend to miss the barn door by a
mile.

There is NO media revolution from videos of cats falling down stairs:
we do expect greater control of, and access to media we've already
bought, however.

Similarly, SaaS is (again) being touted as the biggest revolution
since Edison, but it's hard to envisage cheap local processing power
disappearing when we have so much digital media to manipulate and
juggle. What some SaaS services share with placeshifting services like
Orb is that where the media resides just matters a lot less. As long
as you can get to your spreadsheet/playlist, you worry less about
carrying it with you.

There's also a YouTube video here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fi23xSxFcE

Source The Register

---

› See More: Orb opens up iPhone [and iTouch]

4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:9d6fc20a-9d3c-4d26-
[email protected]:

> On the iPhone and Touch, Orb is accessed through the browser.
It
> wasn't as straightforward as that, however, since Apple
stealthily
> blocks applications that use RTSP, the standard mobile
streaming
> protocol. It will deliver your streams in MP4 instead.
>

I figured Orb was going to do something for it, in spite of the
obvious blocking of streams to it.

I'm using Orb, in three GI homes, here. I bought Orb-compatible
(there's a list on the webpage) TV cards and connected them to
the GI's TV cable. In all 3 homes, this computer is dedicated to
Orb separate from the family's computer the wife uses.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the GIs are streaming live TV from back
home to those Army ruggedized (but not GI proof) laptops and PCs
used in combat over the military broadband network that goes
mostly unused, they tell me. There's plenty of bandwidth once we
get past the upload cap on the cable modem, which is plenty fast
enough to stream RealVideo at 320Kbps to them. We selected
Realmedia because the laptops already had Real on them that works
great and the object is to not install any more software, which
makes the paranoid schitzophrenics in the military nervous.

The boys watch the evening news from home from our local TV
stations just before morning chow as they wake up. Orb works
great!

A word to the iPhone guys, however, is in order. Orb uses your
local codecs to actually play the video, takes the resultant data
stream normally sent to the monitor and soundcard and feeds it to
another application it runs on-demand that converts this data
into which ever stream you have selected, on-the-fly, sending
that stream out over your broadband. Think about this feat....
1 - decoding DivX and converting it into video and audio data
(very CPU intensive)
2 - converting that data into some media stream it supports
(very CPU intensive)
3 - streaming video and audio to Ethernet asap
(mildly CPU intensive)
Add all 3 up and you've just hosed 90% of a processor's comms
with the painfully slow main PC bus and its memory system.

Orb also lets you remote control it from the mobile webpage. At
the bottom of the webpages, there is a place to run its bandwidth
test javascript to you and you can manually set its streamer
speed. Over ATT's crawling Edge network, try the 160Kbps
setting. I don't think Edge will go that fast so try even
slower. This makes the movie a series of slower frames, which
isn't good, but the best it's gonna do on Edge. It runs very
well at 320Kbps on EVDO, if your mobile's processor doesn't get
busy doing other things. Turn off all the automatic running
crap, there, too or it will stutter. WAITING for the damned
email servers to answer, for instance, balks it.

If Orb seems to go crazy because Windoze screwed a codec or
something while you are playing it remotely, Go to the SETTINGS
webpage and there is a place to click to REBOOT ORB by remote
control. This usually restores Orb. You don't even have to re-
logon. Give it a full minute to reboot because every time Orb
boots it looks at ALL the media on ALL the directories you've
programmed it to play to see if you added or dumped anything.
When you boot Orb, the drive light will come on solid for a long
time before Orb has completed this. Time it to see how long
you'll have to wait doing a remote reboot. It does the same at
reboot by remote control and will NOT play anything right until
all this disk activity has stopped. The more files it
streams....the longer this process takes.

Don't plan on doing ANYTHING else while using Orb streaming
anything. It will stall as you overrun the CPU. Turn off all
automatic updates and scheduled virus scans and anything else you
can stop Windoze from doing while using Orb. Orb needs all the
CPU cycles and memory access it can get to do all this, which, if
it's not fighting the damned OS and spyware for attention, it
does very well.

To quote Orb's systems requirements page:

"To have the best MyCasting experience, your home computer on
which you install Orb 2.0 needs the following:

* AMD Athlon 3200+ processor or equivalent, or Intel Pentium
IV 2.4Ghz processor or equivalent (Note that a slower processor
may cause excessive buffering, "stuttering", or "choppiness" when
streaming TV or videos)
* 512MB of RAM
* 100MB available disk space
* Windows XP (Home or Professional) with Service Pack 2, or
Windows XP Media Center Edition (2004 or 2005). Orb is also
compatible with Windows Vista.
* Broadband Internet connection

Note: We recommend a minimum of 1GB of available disk space for
writing media (recorded TV, video, audio and photo) files."

If you don't have a processor and memory as fast as this, Orb
isn't going to work. If you DO have this kind of processing
power, and other things run unexpectedly maxing out the CPU, Orb
isn't going to work. I haven't seen Orb on Vista so don't know
how good that works. Vista does an awful lot of CPU intensive
crap whenever it feels like it and I bet that's not going to be
Orb-friendly, either.

Orb makes the CPU, by the way, VERY HOT while it's streaming.
Make SURE your CPU cooling isn't clogged with dust and all the
fans are running. If you've overclocked it to the limit....Orb
makes it HOTTER than your hottest game! It may blow your
overclocked processor. Orb is one of the few apps that makes my
fans come on full when streaming! A Freon-cooled overclocker
would be nice.

Orb - Yet another web-based application for the iPhone WebTV to
browse to....(c;

Larry
--
You get about ONE DivX movie out of a MotoROKR Z6M bluetooth
modem battery with Orb so carry your charging cord!...(c;

Dammit, Motorola!

http://corp.orb.com/
Orb is freeware. Apple owners, it may take some getting used to.
Yeah, I wish they had a Linux version, too....

4phun wrote:
> "I know, let's give subscribers access to their home music
> collections - and charge nothing for it!" I noticed this announcment
> about Orb a few minutes ago.
>
> Orb opens up iPhone
> By chrissyboy, posted 1 hour ago
>
> Orb is expected to announce that it's supporting Apple's iPhone and
> iPod Touch in the next few days. Orb provides access to your playlists
> and songs on your home PC (as well as photos, videos and TV) from
> anywhere. It's Sling without the hardware, with many users simply
> using it to access their home music collections at work.
>
> On the iPhone and Touch, Orb is accessed through the browser. It
> wasn't as straightforward as that, however, since Apple stealthily
> blocks applications that use RTSP, the standard mobile streaming
> protocol. It will deliver your streams in MP4 instead.
>
> Why is this stealthy software company so significant? Well, for
> starters, it provides the kind of obvious-in-hindsight service that IP
> protocols are all about. Can you imagine a telco waking up one
> morning, thinking: "I know, let's give subscribers access to their
> home music collections - and charge nothing for it!"
>
> "Place-shifting" offers an interesting contrast to the two great hypes
> du jour: User Generated Content with its mantra of "the user is in
> control", and "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Both have a grain of
> truth about them, but supporters do tend to miss the barn door by a
> mile.
>
> There is NO media revolution from videos of cats falling down stairs:
> we do expect greater control of, and access to media we've already
> bought, however.
>
> Similarly, SaaS is (again) being touted as the biggest revolution
> since Edison, but it's hard to envisage cheap local processing power
> disappearing when we have so much digital media to manipulate and
> juggle. What some SaaS services share with placeshifting services like
> Orb is that where the media resides just matters a lot less. As long
> as you can get to your spreadsheet/playlist, you worry less about
> carrying it with you.
>
> There's also a YouTube video here.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fi23xSxFcE
>
> Source The Register
Old. I have been using ORB for well over a year on my enV and Voyager.
I find it sad that Apple cripples their phones. (no MMS, no Bluetooth,
and now to add to the list, attempt to block streaming)

On Dec 13, 5:25 am, 4phun <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> There's also a YouTube video here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fi23xSxFcE
>
> Source The Register

On the iPhone, you'll also have the added benefit of being able to
send links to songs in an SMS chat session.

4phun wrote:
> On Dec 13, 5:25 am, 4phun <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> There's also a YouTube video here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fi23xSxFcE
>>
>> Source The Register
>
> On the iPhone, you'll also have the added benefit of being able to
> send links to songs in an SMS chat session.
My older phones could do that too...

4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:67583dde-d8bc-4642-
[email protected]:

> On the iPhone, you'll also have the added benefit of being able
to
> send links to songs in an SMS chat session.
>
>

So what? Anyone can do that on Skype, Google talk, or any of the
IM systems you can think of. "Links to songs", does that take
you to the iTunes STORE to be fleeced for a song?

Here, I'll link you one in email!

http://music.aol.com/artist/50-cent/1340934

Larry
--
Merry Christmas!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qi_NhFS4xEE

4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:67583dde-d8bc-4642-97e2-
[email protected]:

> On the iPhone, you'll also have the added benefit of being able to
> send links to songs in an SMS chat session.
>
>

Hey, if you run iPhone and MAC OSX at home, can iPhone run MAC at
home, and its apps, by remote control??

I'm curious because I'm typing this message on my BT folding keyboard
on the Nokia N800, which is controlling my WinXP at home via rdesktop
Linux ported to the tablet...through my EVDO broadband on Alltel over
the BT link to my ROKR SELLphone. Way cool....

Larry
--
Merry Christmas!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qi_NhFS4xEE