I will be the first to say that I am not exactly sure why Orb needs some 9 processes in order to run. On the list I see things like a module for pulling the weather information. I have that turned off through my orb web interface, but the process continues to run… What is with that?

One of the ones that people seem to be looking for information on is the cabdirectory.exe process. I am not sure what this one does either. My guess is that it is used by Orb to keep track of all your media files. I wish that orb would provide a little better documentation on what these files are doing. I am sure that there are concerns that Orb is collecting data on it’s users and things like that, and letting us know about those files would help dispel any rumors.

On the other hand, orb is still a great little program. It is making me think to the movie Anti-trust where they are creating a network to provide content to any type of device. Orb is allowing people to watch TV on their Pocket PC device, and supposedly even on Cell Phones. I know that I have connected my cell phone to my laptop to watch movies while on the highway, we are getting closer and closer. Now that Verizon is starting to roll out their higher speed networks, this becomes even more possible.

I can not wait to hear more about what other people are using this software for.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

So I have been using Orb from work to access my media at home for the past week, and I have been very satisfied with it. So let me tell you a little about what I have, so that there is a point of reference.

First of all, my computer at home is an AMD 1600, which means that it is about a 1 GHz processor, not too fast in this day and age. At home, all my computer are connected via a switched 10 Mbit network, not too fast either. About hlaf my contnet is on my the computer running Orb, and the other have is located on my SageTV Server. The entire house in connected to the net via DSL, yet again something that is not too fast. Finally, my computer at home is usually connected to a few torrents, so the entire bandwidth is not taken up by Orb.

On the other hand, my connection at work is a lot better, so the weakest link in my setup is my home computers and network. I have been mainly listening to MP3’s most of the time, which this does fairly well. There is a slow startup time after I select my initial song, while things get buffered. But if I let the player play through a directory, it does not have to buffer agian between tracks or anything like that, so it makes it nice to listen to directories. The sort functions on Orb are not that great, very few and far between. I have always watched an XviD video over the net, the image is not great but it is still fairly good. Since Orb is converting the file on the fly, I would have expected my computer to have trouble with it, but supprisingly I have not noticed any problems but I am sure that if I was working on the computer at the time, I would have problems.

Because I do not have any TV cards on my host computer, I can not try the whole TV stuff, but I might move one of my cards over for a little while so that I can try some stuff out. I do not know yet…

So what is the bad part… First of all, orb has a lot of processes running, even one that continues to run after I shut down orb, CabDirectory.exe or something like that. I know that I have heard several people complaining about the 8 processes that orb starts, including one for weather even though I have turned off the weather feature on my orb homepage. I also worry about what information Orb might be collecting about the people connecting through their service, but I guess only time will tell…

In the end, this is a nice peice of software, but I am always hesitent relying on a service provided by some other group, I would much rather have a way that the Orb serve has no information about my stuff at home and instead just provide a portal that connects directly to my machine, I would feel a little better, but I guess they have to secure a revenue stream some way.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

So I was looking around on my site statistics and saw a link from Technorati, which is a website that receives pings when I update my Blog, and they had one of my posts listed there and appearently someone had followed it… So I went looking at their site and looking in the Media Center tag category and saw links to my site. So then I started down the list and saw this blog about a new Shuttle PC. The blog linked to an article on Engadget talking about this new pc (I would have found it while reading my news posts if I would have waited for that…

Anyways, the PC is suppose to be an “Always On” pc, but in such a way that it does not use power, it shuts down, but can come back up in the same ammount of time as other equipment in my entertainment rack. So this means, I can turn it off at night, and then turn it on only when I want to watch something. Not to mention that the front end of the case looks like the rest of my stereo equipment. It looks like you have to buy a machine already pre-built using this case, which sort of leaves out us DIY’ers. I will keep my fingers crossed, because this would be a nice addition to the rest of my network at home…

-Matt

While surfing through my various news sources, I came across an article talking about a new site: systm.org. The site is based on a techie show that used to be on TechTV before they can taken over and their content changed. Anyways, the site produces two shows: Systm and thebroken. On the site listed above, you can download the episodes of systm, I have not gotten a chance to download yet and see how good of a show they are, but I am looking fdorward to seeing the one that talks about how to build a MythTV based PVR system. I am hoping that more programming like this si going to start coming across the internet, where some groups can produce and distribute television type shows…

-Matt

So, while surfing around today, I came across an interseting link to a software program called ORB. It seems to allow a person to connect over the internet to media files that they have stored on another computer. The setup that I foresee is me sitting at work and accessing media files on my computer at home. Supposedly, it will even allow a person to connect to a TV card in the computer at home and view TV through this connection. Unfortunately, their support page says that if more than one tunner card is in the hosting computer, all must be supported and one of my tuner cards is not suppose to be supported.

For me this is a little annoying, but I do not care because I am not thinking about this for TV. Personally, I want to be able to access my music collection at home while I am at work. Of course, since I just found this link, I am not going to be able to test it yet, but hopefully tonight I will have a little time to get the software installed at home and then I can try it while I am at work tomorrow…

For more information on this product, you can read what got me started on this software here. Look for updates when I get things going…

-Matt

Update: (6/17/2005) So I got things downloaded and installed on my machine at home but I can not connect from work. I am assuming that it is a problem with my machine at home, but I can not trouble shoot until I get home. I was noticing strange behavior with my content on network drives, it did not seem like they were showing up, but hopefully that is just also a minor glitch on my server at home. I will update this again when I have time to try stuff out and see what happens.

Update 2: (6/17/2005) After trying to connect again, I was finally able to connect to some of my media content on my server at home. The first thing that I tried was some music that I had, that worked out pretty good. So now comes the real test, I decided to try an xvid file that I had on my server. All I can say is WOW, it works pretty well… The major limiting factor is two fold, first of all my machine at home is not the fastest around, so I am sure that will effect things. The second problem is that at home we only have a DSL connection, so the upstream speed is not great… Overall, this seems to work great, I just need to get the rest of my content to show up…

Update 3: (6/20/2005) So I got to play around with my setup at home the other night, and I beleive that the problem I was haivng was because I tried having Orb startup automatically when the computer came up, but at that point it could not connect to the network drives, since those were user specific. Thus I changed it so that Orb would start up when I log on, and now I have access to my full collection… Now I just need to play with it a little more.