Orb networks is Free!

[Crashless]

So I was looking around and noticed that orb networks dropped the monthly fee and will be inserting ads instead. So who wants to try it before I get home?

https://my.orb.com/orb/getOrb.jsp

Anyone using this?

[remmy925]

So if I am reading this right, I can watch my recorded shows over the internet at work? Not that I would do such a horrible thing. Even if it is the weekend and no one would se me......

[salsbst]

Looks interesting. Seems like SageTV needs on-the-fly transcoding in order to make Orb redundant.

[remmy925]

wonder what kind of resources that would take to achieve

[remmy925]

And the blonde moment of the week goes to Remmy!
# 2.4Ghz Intel Pentium IV processor or equivalent
# 512MB of RAM
# 100MB available disk space on C: drive

[Wheemer]

That looks really neat... so it'll transcode the mpeg2 realtime and stream another format?

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

That looks really neat... so it'll transcode the mpeg2 realtime and stream another format?

I don't know, that's why I posted it. It seems it would have to be transcoded locally b/c it would take forever to upload a 3gb TV file to their server to be encoded.

I think they provide a web interface to your media, and their local software makes the gateway to their servers and does the transcoding - hopefully...

SOMEONE TRY IT! I'm stuck on a mac at work and can't.

[Wheemer]

It doesn't play with us Canadians yet... or else I would

[remmy925]

I was under the impression that the stream came from the PC to the mobil device or web enabled computer. I would suspect because of the requirments that it transcodes and sends to the device locally on the PC. This may be somethign i want to try......just so say I was curious to watch tv at work.

[remmy925]

Not a bad idea i guess...but when i ran it, it shut off my sage...forget it. :P

[Wheemer]

I installed in on a machine other than my server... My webcam works, but I can't stream videos, it keeps saying the path is wrong...

[Wheemer]

Wow, after waiting a bit longer everything started to work... This is really cool, it is definately trancoding the mpeg2. Streaming and trancoding my sage recodings is taking about 6-70% of my P4 3.0 1gig ram. Regular xvid avis are around 40%.

This testing was all done locally, however it's still streaming at net quality, since I get the streaming speeds are tested from their servers.

It's interresting to see the nvidia decoder icon come up as the streaming starts...

[salsbst]

Have you determined the format/bitrate of the video that your remote device is receiving?

[Wheemer]

I'm not sure how to tell, when I click on a video from my library it starts WMP 10. When you first login, it does a speed test to determin what badwidth you have and dynamically adjusts the bitrate. So if you connect from your phone, it's lower, from work it's higher.

How can I tell, might be any easy thing to do, I just don't know how.

[Crashless]

You should be able to go View->Statistics

or something like that.

[Wheemer]

besides giving me the badwidth, which will be different depending on your upload speed, there's nothing specific in there about the file. It seems the be always called livefeed.asx.

[mayamaniac]

can you stream liveTV and change channels?

[Wheemer]

aparently you can... I'm not gonna mess around installing it on my machine with the tuners though.

Supported TV-tuner cards

* ADS Instant TV Deluxe PTV-305 PCI
* ADS Instant TV Deluxe USB (External)
* Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150, PVR-250 or PVR-350 (Note: WinTV PVR-USB or USB2 are not supported)
* AVerMedia UltraTV Media Center PCI 500 and PCI 550

It supports external tuning too, not sure which ones, but I can select the desired input (svideo, comp, channel 3, etc) then it says no IR devices detected...

If this was seemlessly incorporated in Neilm's webserver it would seriously rock. The only thing that seems to be missing is sharing the videos. I'd like to be able to have a passwrod generator to share specific individual files. Instead you can only share everything with another orb member, i believe.

[mayamaniac]

if it does liveTV streaming plus channel changing and can transcode MPEG2 files to a streaming format, that would really be awesome. I'm still hanging onto BeyondTV just for the LiveTV streaming. But if Orb is not charging a monthly service fee, I might just switch over to it.

[Crashless]

OK, I finally got a chance to run this thing, and I have the answers:

if it does liveTV streaming plus channel changing and can transcode MPEG2 files to a streaming format, that would really be awesome.

It can, but you'll need to give it a tuner to itself. I haven't done that, because I like sage to handle my recording. But if you give it a tuner, it'll do it.

If someone can write some parsing code, you could probably integrate it into nielm's web server. I can't write code, as I'm sure I've posted a million times it seems, so I can't do it.

On my newly upgraded adelphia cable modem (6mbps up/786kbps down) I was getting a 350kbps stream from my neighbor's unprotected wifi. So, yeah, the quality is way more than acceptable. At full screen, it's awesome.

Edit:

Oh yeah, I'm running it on a Windows 2000 system. So don't worry about the 'required windows xp', it runs fine on w2k.