Windows Live Helps You Share Memories

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowslive/archive/2010/04/09/what-to-do-with-57-billion-photos.aspx' target='_blank'>http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/wi...ion-photos.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"These trends remind us that even with tens of billions of photos being stored on social networking and photo sharing sites, there are hundreds of billions more photos and videos sitting on hard drives around the world. Infotrends reports as many as 210 billion photos on PC hard drives in the US alone."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1270859824.usr20447.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Digital media has helped everyone preserve their memories much more easily.&nbsp; From digital cameras to camcorders to camera phones, there is a lot of media out there.&nbsp; The folks at Windows Live realize this and have developed a lot of tools to help you tweak and share this media.&nbsp; With all the options available, it is good to see Microsoft keeping current with the competition.&nbsp; What I am impressed with is that, there is actually enough storage either at home, or in the cloud, to handle all of our memories and then some!&nbsp; It almost makes me think one would never have to do anything like cleaning up our computers.</p>

[ptyork]

I just found out about sharing media player libraries using Win 7 yesterday from Lifehacker. I just tried it. And I'm REALLY impressed. Especially with the video. I just got done streaming an HD episode of TopGear from my house to work. It was perfect. And it allowed for instant playback after seek, i.e., no buffering. Seriously, it was basically like I was sitting at my home PC.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn't have stores and genius bars and why they only have developer evangelists. There's so much good stuff that goes hidden even from self-proclaimed uber-tech-gods like me. :)

On a side note, since it was streaming at 4x my current maximum bandwidth, it caused me to realize that my cable internet service was just upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0. Woo hoo! Looks to be 20'ish down and 2'ish up--at least as best I can tell using remote desktop and Speedtest.net. Not amazing, but compared to 6/384, it is like a whole new world just opened up.

[Hooch Tan]

I saw that post about media player sharing as well. How fast is the access? Currently, I use Orb to share my media when I'm away from home, and it is pretty good, except it doesn't handle subtitles very well, and the interface is excruciatingly slow. It could be just enough reason to upgrade everything to Windows 7 though.

[ptyork]

I saw that post about media player sharing as well. How fast is the access? Currently, I use Orb to share my media when I'm away from home, and it is pretty good, except it doesn't handle subtitles very well, and the interface is excruciatingly slow. It could be just enough reason to upgrade everything to Windows 7 though.

Yeah, Orb was about worthless for me, as well. It also re-encodes all of the video, or at least it used to. The WMP interface seems pretty amazing to me. Not instant, but not much worse than having your media library stored on a network. The startup took maybe 5 seconds--I assume that was just some initial buffering. The video quality was amazing. I did notice a slight voice sync issue at one time, but I'm not sure it wasn't the video itself.

There are a ton of good reasons to upgrade everything to Windows 7. This is just one. Perhaps a really good one, but I can recommend it with no reservation.

[Hooch Tan]

Yeah, Orb was about worthless for me, as well. It also re-encodes all of the video, or at least it used to. The WMP interface seems pretty amazing to me. Not instant, but not much worse than having your media library stored on a network.

I did not mind the transcoding of files, and actually, that works to my advantage since my upstream is a paltry 800kbps. However, navigating through it is such a pain! With Google tracking page load times (meaning it's important!) taking 15-20 seconds for the main page to load with Orb is frustrating.

As for the upgrade to Windows 7, the only thing really holding me back is the cost. I have functional systems as they are, so the extra cost of upgrading to Windows 7 is the same as several terrabytes of storage. :(