Placeshifting with Beyond TV and Orb
May 29th, 2007 at 11:55 am by Tom
Ever been away on business or on vacation and wanted to access your Beyond TV recordings? How about stream your recordings across the Internet? I know there have been times when I am out of town, and have wanted to see what Jack Bauer did on the previous night’s episode of 24. I know I can always wait until I get back home to Houston, but in today’s world of instant gratification, that is a preposterous thought.
Along Comes Orb
To all of you who can relate to my scenario above– I’d like to introduce you to Orb (http://www.orb.com), a free placeshifting application that allows you to make all of your Beyond TV recordings accessible over the Internet. And best of all, Orb will automatically transcode your Beyond TV recordings to a bitrate that is suitable for your Internet connection! For example, I recorded an episode of South Park at 7 Mbps (Beyond TV’s “Best” MPEG-2 quality) on my Beyond TV box at home the other day. When playing the file back through Orb’s web portal, the video was being transcoded at an average of 350 Kbps. The bitrate would dynamically adjust depending on the connection speed I had at a particular moment.
To make Orb work, you first must download Orb’s application (13.9 MB), and install it on a host PC. During the installation process (detailed below) you will create an Orb account, and then do some configuration telling Orb where your media is stored. Finally, to access your media, simply log into Orb’s website with the account information that you created during installation, and let the streaming begin!
I was telling our designer, Joel, about Orb the other day. Joel had a vacation coming up in Cozumel, Mexico, so he decided to get set up with Orb so he could attempt to stream his video internationally. In Joel’s words:
I went to a wedding recently in Cozumel, Mexico. When I arrived, I had some free time at the hotel I was staying at so I logged on the one of the hotel’s Internet stations.
Once on the web I was curious to find out if the Orb software I installed would continue to work even outside of the country. I simply typed in my password and navigated to where my recorded shows were located on my home computer. I chose “Ugly Betty� and it started to play. I only watched a few minutes of the show, but for a split second, it felt like I was home on my couch, enjoying one of my shows.
Want to try setting up Orb for your own scenario? If so, a detailed setup process can be found below.
Orb Setup Instructions
- Find a directory on your PC that you wish to access across the Internet.
- Add the folder to Beyond TV’s video library, allowing newly recorded content to be recorded to the folder you wish to share.
- Download Orb by visiting www.orb.com.
- After the file has finished downloading, run the executable.
- Step through the first few screens until you arrive to a screen that asks you to create an Orb login. If you do not have an Orb account, click on Create an Account.
- Choose which types of media you would like to access via Orb.
- Almost there– click on finish.
- Finally, click on Finish again. Orb should automatically run after you click on finish. If it does not, launch Orb from the desktop.
- When Orb is running, you will be able to see it in your PC taskbar. To configure which folders you would like to share with Orb, right-click on the “Orb” tray icon, and choose “Configuration”.
- This will launch a window that allows you to tell Orb where your video, music, photos and document folders are located. For this case, I have added “K:” to my Video folders, “K:\photos” as my Photo folder and “K:\music” as my Music folder. The files in these folders will be accessible to me when I am logged into my Orb account.
- After you have configured your media folders, from a different PC, navigate to http://www.orb.com. Once loaded, highlight “sign in” in the top-right portion of the page, and click on “Orb 2.0″. Log into the proceeding page with the username and password that you created in the Orb setup wizard.
- Once logged in, your homescreen will appear. In my homescreen, I have videos, music, photos and weather displayed for me.
- To get to a Video only screen, I will click on “Open Application”, and then choose “Video” from the drop-down menu.
- A list of videos (I configured Orb to look in my K: drive for videos) is shown to me. My Beyond TV recordings automatically get stored into my K: drive, so this screen is continually being updated depending on which new recordings have taken place.
- To play a video back, I highlight “South Park - (The Brown Noise)-2007-05-10-0″ and click on the Play icon.
- After I click on the play icon, my South Park episode begins playing back to me in Windows Media Player.
Conclusion
It is a snap to get Orb up and running. For the effort required, the cost of using Orb (free), and the benefit of being able to stream Beyond TV recordings across the Internet, I recommend Orb to any Beyond TV user.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Tom,
Great how-to. Orb is definitely a great, free placeshifting software that works with all media. Unfortunately I sometimes have problems with the amount of CPU it uses up on my BTV server though. For recorded shows, I use ccarlins latest version of the built-in BeyondTV webadmin to stream (placeshift) recorded TV shows that reside on my BeyondTV server. It doesn’t use as much CPU and it’s built into BeyondTV. All you need to add to your setup is VLC (free video app) and the latest version of webadmin as modified by ccarlin.
Here is a video walk-through of how it works. I the meantime, I do use Orb for DVD’s saved on the hard drive as well as music.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I once had Orb on my BTV server to watch videos on my Nintendo Wii. However, Orb started to be very resource hungry and would sometimes run the CPU at 100% rendering my server unusable. Had to ditch it.
June 1st, 2007 at 3:04 am
I have both running on a media server because of the cpu usage of ORB. it works fine for me and orb 2.0 is great… 1.0 wasnt
I watch Live TV on my cingular 8125 ppc via 3G all the time….
I have to keep up on my SF Giants
really its great and the file explorer replace my FTP server that I was running.
June 6th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
The byond TV link did not work for me, choppy picture, etc. So, I was sceptical about Orb, and tried it anyway. It really worked. Although I hate my Palm Treo 700W, it actually showed a great TV picture with sound. Laptops tests were also excellent. I can’t believe this really works and isn;t the biggest think in the world. I’ve been telling everyone!
June 6th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
How do they make money? Ad ware?
June 6th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Eric J: Good question, their strategy is explained here: http://tedshelton.blogspot.com/2005/03/orb-is-free.html. In summary, they home to use their place-shifting stuff as foot in the door with the eventual goal of selling consumers digital content. And with some advertising sprinkled in there.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Brent: I saw the modified WebAdmin functionality the other day… pretty cool! And I too was impressed by the extremely low CPU utilization. One advantage of the Orb stuff over what I saw of the VLC/modified-WebAdmin approach is that Orb will size up your Internet connection on the fly and transcode accordingly. With the VLC/modified-WebAdmin method, you have to figure out what bandwidth your connection can handle and you have to do that everytime depending on what connection you are on. Another advantage to Orb is it eliminates the need to do any Dynamic DNS stuff. But anyways, the work done for the VLC/modified-Webadmin is pretty damn cool. I just wanted to balance your comments with some of the advantages of Orb. The latter is more of a ‘it just works’ solution.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Too bad it’s not integrated like the SageTV placeshifter application.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:02 pm
It’s too bad that Orb doesn’t allow you to fast forward through the commercials (or use SmartSkip). Orb doesn’t allow no more than 500MB size file to download into my computer either, so I stopped using Orb.
June 30th, 2007 at 2:01 am
JS said, “Too bad it’s not integrated like the SageTV placeshifter application.”
Yes, but it also doesn’t cost $100.00, like SageTV Placeshifter. What a rip-off.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:26 am
well, Orb is a “Good” app that gives me the access to the content that stored on my PC, However, It just doesn’t work on my Sony Erissons (W900, K800i), streaming could never work after hundreds of times trying. Had to stop using the app since it can’t satisify my streaming demand.
Coincidently found this new and free app called Mobile Media Center,very new, never heard of it before, it pops up on most blogs and tech forums,
Curiously downloaded and tried the app, the app will have to be installed on PC, no complicated configurations. On mobile, it’s has a very simple (really really simple) interface, I was a bit disappointed in the interface design and input, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, that’s all I have got on I mobile, even had the thought that I was punked by their aggressive marketing presentation/compaigns, but I realized that I was wrong until I streamed. Unbelievely fast, smooth. Unlike Orb, I could even stream the whole DVD on my mobile. Streaming music works also fine.
http://www.mobilemediacenter.nl (is it a Dutch company??) well, who cares!!!
July 13th, 2007 at 7:27 am
well, Orb is a “Good” app that gives me the access to the content that stored on my PC, However, It just doesn’t work on my Sony Erissons (W900, K800i), streaming could never work after hundreds of times trying. Had to stop using the app since it can’t satisify my streaming demand.
Coincidently found this new and free app called Mobile Media Center,very new, never heard of it before, it pops up on most blogs and tech forums,
Curiously downloaded and tried the app, the app will have to be installed on PC, no complicated configurations. On mobile, it’s has a very simple (really really simple) interface, I was a bit disappointed in the interface design and input, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, that’s all I have got on I mobile, even had the thought that I was punked by their aggressive marketing presentation/compaigns, but I realized that I was wrong until I streamed. Unbelievely fast, smooth. Unlike Orb, I could even stream the whole DVD on my mobile. Streaming music works also fine.
http://www.mobilemediacenter.nl (is it a Dutch company??) well, who cares!!!
July 17th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Ken said “Yes, but it also doesn’t cost $100.00, like SageTV Placeshifter. What a rip-off.”
Hyperbole is unwarranted; Sage’s Placeshifter costs no more than a client license for BeyondTV.
I used to be a BTV user, and left for only two reasons: the lack of an integrated media center, and the lack of full support for the Media MVP. Sage offers both, albeit in a clunkier package. Both products are good products, and it’s exciting to see the two different packages evolve.
July 25th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Orb works for me, except, it shows up most shows at 800×800 resolution, and now way to get the aspect ration correct. Some shows show up properly, but most are wrong. Also, does not appear to support the Fusion HDTV Tuner for live tv feed.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Wow… knowing the history of SS, this post completely disgusts me. I started years ago with SnapStream Media 2.5 (before it was called BTV). Back then there was only a “web-admin” (no FSUI) and the whole idea of SnapStream was to stream TV to anywhere. With BTV 3.0 came the FSUI and SS got less and less interested in the streaming part. When they came out with BTV Link and started charging for it I became totally fed up with SS. The reason I bought it in the first place was to stream TV to my other rooms and to work, now they stoped supporting live streaming with MPEG2 cards and they want to charge me extra for the Link app???
Orb has succeeded at the origional idea of SS (where SS has failed miserably). I loved Orb when it works, but I no longer run it since it often locks up my PC at 100% CPU.
My biggest recomendation to all you BTV users out there is STOP RECORDING TV! There is no reason for it. Other people will do it for you. I have Azureous with RSS-FeedScanner set up to auto-download as TV epps get uploaded to the internet. Commercials are pre-cut out, files sizes are smaller, quality is better, and I often get TV before it even airs on my coast. I even have 2 epps of Dexter and 6 epps of Weeds that won’t air for months. http://www.eztvefnet.org/index.php?main=showlist
October 21st, 2007 at 11:13 am
>>”My biggest recomendation to all you BTV users out there is STOP RECORDING TV! There is no reason for it. Other people will do it for you. I have Azureous with RSS-FeedScanner set up to auto-download as TV epps get uploaded to the internet.”
December 14th, 2007 at 10:46 am
would not open in media center for windows