How to turn your computer into a streaming media player

Posted on August 25, 2007 at 12:49 pm

Wouldn’t it be great it you could stream your entire music collection to any Internet connected device you own, such as a laptop, mobile phone, PDA, etc? Instead of having to carry around your iPod when visiting your grandparents, why not just access your songs, music, videos, or even your TV from their computer?

Using Orb, you can turn your computer into a media hosting server and have access to all of your media from any PC at any time. This means you don’t have to upload any files to a hosting server, since your computer will become the server. Of course, this type of media access has the disadvantage of using up resources on your personal computer. However, if you have a power dual-core Windows Vista machine with 300GB of storage space and all you do is browse the Internet, it’s time to use that behemoth for something more intensive!

Orb is completely free, has a tons of features, and has a great-looking easy-to-use interface. You can access ANY media that’s on your computer remotely including music, photos, videos, documents, and TV. If you want to access TV, of course, your computer will have to have a TV tuner card. But if you do, you can access your TV channels from work, at the airport, or wherever there is Internet!

To get started with Orb, download the program and create a new account. Then choose which types of media files you want to be able to access from anywhere:

After your account is setup, you need to configure the locations for your media by right-clicking on the icon in the taskbar and choosing Configure.

Go ahead and click on the Media tab to setup the locations for music, photos, videos, and documents. You can add as many as you like and Orb will display them all. You can also click on the Advanced tab and check off the box “Run Orb when I am not logged in“. This will ensure that even if the computer is restarted for some reason (your kids), the service will still be running and you’ll be able to access your files.

Next, you need to go to http://mycast.orb.com and login with your new account. You’ll be brought to your personal homepage, which is where you will come whenever you want to access files from another PC. Click on the green Open Application button to choose view the files on your computer. It will automatically connect to the client you downloaded.

Note that the Orb application needs to be running in your taskbar in order for this to work. If it cannot connect, you’ll get an error message. Also, if you’re behind a firewall, you have to open up ports and/or unblock the application in Windows. The ports that need to be opened are 82, 85, and 86.

The cool thing about Orb is that it automatically detects the settings of the viewing device, including bandwidth, screen size, and resolution and then optimizes the content for that device. Whether you’re on the new iPhone or a Windows Mobile PDA or even your girlfriend’s iMac, you can stream all your media easily!

As mentioned above, the interface is also awesome. You can sort your songs by all kinds of different criteria, create your own playlists by dragging and dropping songs, listen to or even record Internet radio, and share your music via Orb, your blog, MySpace, email, SMS or RSS!

This service is very cool and a great way to use a super fast desktop that’s just sitting at home. Enjoy!

Src: Lifehacker

[tags]streaming media server, stream your own music, how to stream your music, streaming media player, upload your own music, stream my own music[/tags]

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One Response to “How to turn your computer into a streaming media player”

MP3Tunes - Free online MP3 file storage and backup Says:

[...] on how you can access your media files from anywhere through a web browser using a service called Orb, which basically turned your computer into a hosting server of it’s own so that you can [...]
September 12th, 2007 at 9:10 am