Orb – All of Your Media, Anywhere, Anytime

Imagine being able to watch television programs that you’ve recorded on your home PC from a hotel room a thousand miles away — on your cell phone. Or being able to watch one of your DVDs that you’ve backed up at home during a 2 hour layover at the airport using your PDA. Or being able to listen to the music you’ve ripped at home from your friend’s house. Or send a link in an e-mail to your parents so they can watch a slideshow of your latest pictures. That’s Orb.

In a nutshell, Orb give you the capability to access all types of data on your home PC (like music, video, pictures, web browser favorites, e-mail contacts, etc.) from any just about any web-enabled device that’s using a broadband connection.

You install the Orb software on your home PC and set up the types of media that you want Orb to know about. You don’t have to worry about what types of devices you’ll be using to access the media — Orb will take care of that part of the equation. Gone are the days when you need one version of a video file to run on a PC and a different version to run on a PDA. You just tell the Orb software where the files are that you want to make available and it’ll handle the rest.

From a remote location (like that hotel room or airport) you log into your account on the Orb website. The Orb servers contact the Orb software running on your home PC and the website will show you all of the media that you’ve set up divided into broad categories (TV, Photo, Audio, Video). When you choose a file the magic starts.

The Orb software knows what kind of device you’re using from the remote connection (like a laptop or PDA), what the capabilities of the device are (maybe it’s a 320×240 screen resolution), and what the connection speeds are on your end and on your home PC’s end. When you choose the file you’d like to see from the website the software decides what it needs to do to be able to send the file to you. Maybe it needs to shrink a picture so that it can fit on your cell phone. Maybe it needs to transcode a video file that was recorded at 640×480 resolution to fit onto your 320×240 resolution PDA. Maybe it needs to convert your Windows Media audio files into MP3′s. Maybe the wireless network connection to your hotel room isn’t very fast and the video rate needs to be throttled back. The Orb software will do whatever it needs to do in order to give you the media you’ve asked in a format that whatever device you’re using can understand.

There are other capabilities that Orb provides in addition to music, pictures, and video. You can look up your home weather or television listings, access the favorites from your IE or Firefox browsers, find a contact from Outlook or Thunderbird, or even transfer files to and from your home PC. The Orb software gives you all types of links to the data on your home PC.

If you’re looking for a way to access files, data, or information stored on your home PC from a remote location you need look no further than Orb. Not bad for free software.

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