Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Using Orb with the Wii
Posted by Chris Gohlke in "SOFTWARE" @ 07:00 AM
Orb has been brought up before as a software option to the Slingbox. If you PC had a video card, you could install the free software and basically do everything with it that you could have done with a Slingbox. Since I already have a Slingbox, I had never given Orb a try. Orb has added the ability to work with the Wii, 360, and PS3, giving me a new reason to take a look.
Since the Wii is pretty light on media center like capabilities on its own, lets take a look at what Orb will let you do on your Wii.
To start with, Orb is software that you install on your PC. Installation is pretty simple, but it did take some fiddling to be able to connect to it through my firewall. Once you've installed it, you point your Wii's browser to www.orb.com and sign in. The website detects your browser and automatically optimizes the site to your browser.
Instead of a bunch of still image captures, I created the following video to walk you through Orb on the Wii and give you a feeling for how it performs.
Once you are in, you get a Media Center-esque interface. You can stream webcams connected to your PC as well as any music, video, and photo content. You can additionally stream from a TV tuner in your PC, but since I don't have one, I skipped that.
The webcam streaming is cool if you are streaming to a PC at a remote location, but a bit less useful if you are just in the next room.
Audio streaming will allow you to browse by artist, title, etc. or you can use playlists you have already set up. You can also just set it to shuffle all your music. Once the stream starts, your cover art will be displayed on screen (if your MP3's have it) and you have basic controls for pausing, skipping, and volume control. I'd like to see an option to also display tag information for the song being streamed.
Video streaming will allow you to watch videos from your PC on your Wii. Orb converts them on the fly to a format the Wii can play. While it certainly is not the best of quality, it is watchable. As you can see in the video demo, it takes a couple of seconds to sync up when starting a new video stream, but other than that I had no problems playing videos. However, I have heard from another user that found the video to be unwatchable due to clipping and pixelation and suspects it to be a bug in the program. I'd also imagine the memory constraints of the Wii probably are the biggest obstacle to presenting higher quality video.
The photo viewer is a nice touch. You can set it to stream a slide show with a variety of transitions of anything in your My Photos folder. It would be cool if they could allow music in the background during a slide show.
Finally, I added a quick look at the browser. Nintendo recently released the final version of the Wii browser (the previous version was a beta). I briefly touched on the Wii browser back in this article and thought it would be interesting to see the changes. There are quite a few improvements in the browser, including improved readability, navigation, and speed. I found that most web pages are now very readable. Pages look much better than in this video, mainly because it was recorded via composite rather than component and the fact that the conversion for YouTube reduced the quality of that recording considerably.
I wholeheartedly recommend you give Orb a try if you have a Wii. I think it adds a whole new dimension to the capabilities of this cool little console. And at the price of nothing, you really can't go wrong. You can get Orb from www.orb.com.
Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.
Since the Wii is pretty light on media center like capabilities on its own, lets take a look at what Orb will let you do on your Wii.
To start with, Orb is software that you install on your PC. Installation is pretty simple, but it did take some fiddling to be able to connect to it through my firewall. Once you've installed it, you point your Wii's browser to www.orb.com and sign in. The website detects your browser and automatically optimizes the site to your browser.
Instead of a bunch of still image captures, I created the following video to walk you through Orb on the Wii and give you a feeling for how it performs.
Once you are in, you get a Media Center-esque interface. You can stream webcams connected to your PC as well as any music, video, and photo content. You can additionally stream from a TV tuner in your PC, but since I don't have one, I skipped that.
The webcam streaming is cool if you are streaming to a PC at a remote location, but a bit less useful if you are just in the next room.
Audio streaming will allow you to browse by artist, title, etc. or you can use playlists you have already set up. You can also just set it to shuffle all your music. Once the stream starts, your cover art will be displayed on screen (if your MP3's have it) and you have basic controls for pausing, skipping, and volume control. I'd like to see an option to also display tag information for the song being streamed.
Video streaming will allow you to watch videos from your PC on your Wii. Orb converts them on the fly to a format the Wii can play. While it certainly is not the best of quality, it is watchable. As you can see in the video demo, it takes a couple of seconds to sync up when starting a new video stream, but other than that I had no problems playing videos. However, I have heard from another user that found the video to be unwatchable due to clipping and pixelation and suspects it to be a bug in the program. I'd also imagine the memory constraints of the Wii probably are the biggest obstacle to presenting higher quality video.
The photo viewer is a nice touch. You can set it to stream a slide show with a variety of transitions of anything in your My Photos folder. It would be cool if they could allow music in the background during a slide show.
Finally, I added a quick look at the browser. Nintendo recently released the final version of the Wii browser (the previous version was a beta). I briefly touched on the Wii browser back in this article and thought it would be interesting to see the changes. There are quite a few improvements in the browser, including improved readability, navigation, and speed. I found that most web pages are now very readable. Pages look much better than in this video, mainly because it was recorded via composite rather than component and the fact that the conversion for YouTube reduced the quality of that recording considerably.
I wholeheartedly recommend you give Orb a try if you have a Wii. I think it adds a whole new dimension to the capabilities of this cool little console. And at the price of nothing, you really can't go wrong. You can get Orb from www.orb.com.
Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.
