Multimedia
With the use of a PC as a Media Centre/PC in our living rooms becoming more common, especially with the use of Intel’s ViiV and AMD’s “Live!” technologies, the digital house is now starting to become mobile with remote access to digital files stored on your PC now being possible. This is a good time to discover Orb 2.0!
Taking the same interface as Windows Media Centre and Yahoo! Go, Media Portal, GeexBox and Meedio, Orb presents the unique advantage of being able to share your digital contents with people of your choice, or on any roaming device that has an internet connection.
Simple, convivial and mobile: these are the three axes that Orb is built around and we are only in beta version 2.0. This still leaves a lot of room to move for future improvements and better fluidity. Don’t forget also that you don’t have to spend a lot of money with Orb either compared to most other players on the market as you don’t require a dedicated server. It will be possible (in theory) for mobile operators to be able to offer unlimited TV subscriptions or even new services.
This service has been made free to 400 000 PC users around the world while they are hoping to pass the one million users so as to integrate targeted advertising into the software’s interface, certainly with the help of “spy” software.
But for using is just in the lounge room, nothing is better then a real Media Centre. If on the other hand you are looking to use the Wii as a multimedia platform, then in these conditions, it will work ok. The principle of adapted quality streaming which depends on the quality of your home internet connection (only for video) and that of your friends with whom you want to share your video files, is not a bad idea. The problem though is that you will see a noticeable degradation in the picture quality, which is not very annoying on a mobile screen, but very restrictive on a large screen TV.
In the end, the ideal solution is still a real Media Centre at home, based on a PC which is easy to add functions to (codec updates, High Definition support, digital recorder, lounge room player, etc), so as to take advantage of all digital formats in your lounge room. Add to this a sharing program like Orb and you have the perfect PC. Besides just being a central place to store all of your multimedia files, it will also make them accessible from anywhere
Simple, convivial and mobile: these are the three axes that Orb is built around and we are only in beta version 2.0. This still leaves a lot of room to move for future improvements and better fluidity. Don’t forget also that you don’t have to spend a lot of money with Orb either compared to most other players on the market as you don’t require a dedicated server. It will be possible (in theory) for mobile operators to be able to offer unlimited TV subscriptions or even new services.
This service has been made free to 400 000 PC users around the world while they are hoping to pass the one million users so as to integrate targeted advertising into the software’s interface, certainly with the help of “spy” software.
But for using is just in the lounge room, nothing is better then a real Media Centre. If on the other hand you are looking to use the Wii as a multimedia platform, then in these conditions, it will work ok. The principle of adapted quality streaming which depends on the quality of your home internet connection (only for video) and that of your friends with whom you want to share your video files, is not a bad idea. The problem though is that you will see a noticeable degradation in the picture quality, which is not very annoying on a mobile screen, but very restrictive on a large screen TV.
In the end, the ideal solution is still a real Media Centre at home, based on a PC which is easy to add functions to (codec updates, High Definition support, digital recorder, lounge room player, etc), so as to take advantage of all digital formats in your lounge room. Add to this a sharing program like Orb and you have the perfect PC. Besides just being a central place to store all of your multimedia files, it will also make them accessible from anywhere
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May 23rd, 2013 - 12:47 AM ET
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