Orb Networks

[civerson4]

Orb Networks has apparently dropped their misguided "subscription" model to access MCE and XP media content remotely (this looks pretty similar to a gotomypc for media content). It looks like it is now a "free service"

Anyone have any experience/thoughts on the service? Apparently, it will allow you to stream live TV over the internet when usiing a PVR 150-250-500. I haven't tried it yet, but plan to shortly.

http://www.orb.com/

[parsecmacher]

Yup tried it when I found out it was now free.

It's great, it actually worked! well the live streaming tv that is.

Installed it last night on my HTPC. I have a PVR-250 in there.
Went to work, tried it, and I can view live TV through windows media!
My officemates were impressed at this new technology, it was just too late
for march madness though

The only problem that I am having is that I could not play mpg2 files recorded from beyond tv. I know I have the right codecs. I copied the file manually on my laptop at home and windows media player played it fine.

Has somebody had success playing mpg2 video files?

[DonK]

So how does this pertain to Beyond TV?

[mikem]

Originally Posted by DonK

So how does this pertain to Beyond TV?

At a quick guess it is allowing them to stream across the internet with a PVR-250. As BTV don't officially support the use of software recorders and hardware recorders in the same server then it allows us to supplement BTV with functionallity that BTV doesn't offer but we would like.

[Keith]

DonK - So how does this pertain to Beyond TV?

mikek - ...it allows us to supplement BTV with functionallity that BTV doesn't offer...

It also allows you to view your recordings remotley without having to convert to WMV or lower bitrates.

Originally Posted by parsecmacher

I could not play mpg2 files recorded from beyond tv

I think it is sensitive to to high of a bitrate as some of my recordings work and others I get audio and no video, still trying different things with it.

[merrypig]

I looked at this. It's a nice idea.. but..

There is absolutely no reason this has to bounce of orb.com net. An application could easily do this conversion and expose the ports locally for direct point/point access. (with firewall ports set appropriately obviously).

The fact that this is "free" and that orb must be providing bandwidth for a lot of this makes me really really suspicious about the intent and usage of the service data. For example, they get a complete catalog of your movie/video collection and your name/email/address etc. Sure, it's convenient to present this data, but I could get that data direct from my machine without orb's network being involved. If it's a simple 'dns' front end then why does it need my catalog ON their server itself. it could easily point at my machine and let me get it directly.

I like the real time wmv encoding of the mpeg file I had. But this is all stuff you can do without orb's services.

I think I'm going to uninstall it and think about my paranoia and suspicions a while before I use this in earnest.