What do you Think of Orb?

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.orb.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.orb.com/</a><br /><br /></div>I was curious to hear what people thought of <a href="http://www.orb.com/">Orb</a>. I tried it for a few weeks and ultimately uninstalled it from my system for one reason: it was a massive resource hog. I had it installed on my system that contains all my photos (about 10,000 photos), all my music (about 12,000 songs), and all my video and TV shows. Orb would fire up and consume 99% of my CPU resources when no client was accessing it. It obviously does some sort of caching - I had many folders littered with Orb temp files. They're usually hidden, but a file sync program I use has the nasty habit of making all hidden files visible, so I can see what a mess Orb left behind. The resource usage wasn’t constant, but it seemed to chew up far too many resources. In terms of the experience, I thought it was decent, but not exceptional - over WiFi on my Dell Axim X50v it too slow for my liking. I couldn't imagine how bad it would be over GPRS on a Smartphone. <br /><br />Ultimately a 100% Web-based solution is slow and ponderous - what they need is a real client, something that allows them to pass nothing more than the list of files to the device. All the UI would be loaded locally, and when it came time to send the file, that's <i>all</i> that would get sent.<br /><br />Has your experience with Orb been better than mine?

[stevehiner]

Like you, I ran orb for a while, eventually turned off the services and ultimately uninstalled it.

Without doing much research I couldn't find an easy way to make it leave my TV Tuners alone. Because I use BeyondTV I didn't want Orb touching the tuners because it stopped BTV from recording.

I really like the idea of what Orb is offering but I think they need to make their software less intrusive and less resource hungry if they want widespread adoption.

[Darius Wey]

FWIW, I prefer Avvenu, but comparing the two is a little bit of an apples vs. oranges thing. It doesn't do everything Orb does, but then again, Orb doesn't do everything Avvenu does.

Avvenu is still in pre-release stages and there are a whole heap of features that are about to be rolled out. To top it off, it is hardly a resource hog - it sits in the tray and chews up 500KB of memory.

[tshelton]

I work for Orb so I am very interested in your comments. We are constantly working to improve the product and feedback is very valuable. I was surprised at the comment that Avvenu has some features that Orb doesn't -- I'd really like to hear what they are -- we think we do everything Avvenu does plus a whole lot more. And Avvenu wants to charge a fee (Orb is free). We are working on a new interface to make our sharing easier to use, but its all there now.

On the points made about Orb being a "resource hog" I would like to hear more about the problems that were encountered. The only time Orb uses any CPU cycles when you are not actually watching TV, listening to audio, or looking at photos is when you initially install and an index needs to be built to all of your media. So if you looked at the CPU usage immediately after installation that may be why you had the impression that it uses a lot. After that it uses zero CPU unless you are actually doing something.

The task that takes the most CPU is converting live TV from a tuner card to a stream for windows media, real, or a 3GPP player. This can take about 25% of the CPU for a 2.6 G Pentium 4. Nothing else comes near this, however. Tell me more about what you were doing and what kind of machine you were running it on.

As for choppy video -- I am very surprised to hear about this and would definitely like more details on what you were doing. We have been working on special support for the Dell Axim -- as the only PDA with a 640 x 480 resolution we can send a much better picture to it than any other PDA. So you may have tried us on a day when the code for the Axim had been rolled out but wasn't 100% stable yet. It works great today.

I hope you will give Orb another try, and in any case please share more about your experiences with me so that we can improve the product.

best.

Ted Shelton ( [email protected] )
[/i]

[Darius Wey]

Ted, I haven't tried Orb in a while, so I'll happily give it another go. It seems a lot of things have been updated since then, so I'm sure it'll be a lot better than when I last gave it a spin.

One question I have though: Have you extended support to other countries yet? If not, when are you planning on doing so - in my case, Australia? Thanks.

[tshelton]

Darius:

Orb works everywhere in the world, but when you say "country support" I assume you mean, do we have TV guide info for Australia. The hard part here is finding someone to license it from in every geography (as we want to keep the product legit). We are close on a couple of non-US locales but not AU -- know who we could get the TV guide info from?

best

Ted Shelton

[Darius Wey]

Darius:

Orb works everywhere in the world, but when you say "country support" I assume you mean, do we have TV guide info for Australia. The hard part here is finding someone to license it from in every geography (as we want to keep the product legit). We are close on a couple of non-US locales but not AU -- know who we could get the TV guide info from?

Hi Ted. Sorry, I did mean TV guide info. I can think of a few, but I'll need to look into them to see if they will be suitable for Orb. Can I get back to you by emailing you? :)

[tshelton]

Thanks, looking forward to hearing back from you. You can contact me via email --

tshelton (at) orb.com

[Jason Dunn]

Thanks for chiming in Ted! It's nice when representatives of the products we post on stop by.

So if you looked at the CPU usage immediately after installation that may be why you had the impression that it uses a lot. After that it uses zero CPU unless you are actually doing something.

Nope, the high CPU usage I was seeing was after it was installed for a few days - I'd expect the initial scan to be CPU intensive, but I'd see lots of random activity when no client was connected.

I'll give it another try and see if I can notice any patterns.

[Magellan]

I had the same problem as Stevehiner. I blew up my recordings from BTV, so I took it off ASAP. tshelton, go here www.snapstream.com for info on Beyond TV if you need to. If you could leave the TV tuner alone, I would try it again.

[tshelton]

We have a relationship with ADS, and they ship the Beyond TV software. I'll ask the testing guys to take a look at why this is.

best,

Ted