I mentioned Orb a little while ago. Today I finally got to take it for a more real-life test drive. The screenshot on the right shows the http://my.orb.com/ application along with Windows Media Player. In the screenshot, you can see WMP playing the NCAA Finals. It’s actually showing it live, streamed straight from my cable connection via my Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250.
From work I get a very nice 300-500kbps stream. Video is clear, has a good framerate and the audio sounds as good as it does when I’m sitting in my living room. Even with WMP expanded to full screen, the picture looks decent. It’s obviously not HDTV, but considering the feat of networking going on, it looks pretty good.
From my mom’s house it’s another story. I get about 100kbps. At this point, compression artifacts start making the video look pretty bad. The framerate is fine, but you get lots of fuzzies when the picture is moving. Audio still sounds great, so if you just want to listen to a sporting event or the news it’ll work fine. Sitcoms are okay as long as you’re willing to put up with the artifacts.
In all, I think Orb is pretty sweet. Consider that it’s free to use (and still ad-free for the time being) and you really can’t complain at all. There are some things I would love to see in future versions of Orb, though:
- A standalone version that doesn’t require me to connect to the Orb website. I have a static IP and know enough about networking to configure my firewall that I really shouldn’t have to go through Orb’s website. I’m sure it would also reduce Orb’s bandwidth costs considerably.
- I’ve no idea what form the ads will take in the future, but let me pay some money to get out of having to see ads. I’ll pay for Orb Premium if it means I can have no ads and don’t have to go to Orb’s website.
- Support for DRM’d content. I have video from TiVo ToGo and music from a Napster-like service, all of which is protected by DRM that WMP is able to play back locally. Figure out some way for me to also be able to play it back remotely.
- Being able to search TV listings. Unless I’m missing something, it would appear you can only search TV listings by paging through the guide. When I’m looking to set up a recording in the future, it would be much easier to type in the show name and search for it.
- Along the lines of scheduling recordings, it would be nice to be able to set up and maintain recurring recordings (similar to TiVo’s season pass).