Alternatives to Orb for all platforms with any license

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Orb Comments

Hard to replace

Comment by JJtoob
about Orb · May 2015 · Helpful Not helpful 1 Helpful Report as spam

I haven't gone through all the alternatives, but the thing is that Orb did much more than your average file/music streamer. One of the best features it had, and that I used frequently, was the ability to show extra things on the video side, like your webcam, and if your webcam had tilt/pan/zoom controls, it might even let you use them, or watch TV if you had a TV tuner installed in your computer, and it even let you control the TV tuner, so you could change channels, all live!

Viewing your webcam is not something hard to come by, though many stream programs won't do it, because they are designed to watch videos on demand, not live sources.

The ability to control the TV tuner on top of everything else it did, is a feature I hadn't seen before, and no one has implemented it since. I moved on to another service called Tonido, just for a while, until storage got easy enough to come by that I could have most if not all of my media with me. The TV thing, though, is something you really can't replace unless your cable package comes with a similar solution, and I wonder how many people have that available.

[Edited by JJtoob, July 04]

reply
zeyoner · Dec 2016

JJtoob,

I completely agree.

I have yet to really find a solution to replace Orb. Qualcomm acquired and appears to have done away with the service all together. Which really sucks, Orb had so much potential. Currently I'm using Plex. I was using Emby (formerly Media Browser) but it's still lacking. I'm not a fan of Emby's user accounts and login design! However it does support live TV streaming but it still needs work.

Orb is just one of those applications that I am going to miss dearly and there is NO alternative. Even though Emby comes pretty close.

[Edited by zeyoner, December 07]