Orb Server and Vunow

Bouncing around the Internet I found lists of UPNP servers. Somehow I found one that claimed to be able to stream live TV to any UPNP device. The program I found was called Orb this can be found at orb.com. This program is currently freeware, so after I found it and read a little about the server I downloaded and installed it. As I tried it out the first thing I found after seeing that it worked is that you can pause the video stream. Oh how great this feature is after having Media Center and not being able to stop the video to do anything. The huge negative that I noticed was that the fast forward and rewind do not work well at all. The video freezes and most of the time stops the video. The interface for the Vunow Box is decent. It is pretty easy to navigate, but the organization takes a little getting used to. In order to get live TV you have to have a TV tuner card. The only computer I currently have is an HP Laptop. I got a Pinnacle 801e SE USB tuner. The usb tuner uses the on board processor of the computer to encode the signals that come in through the tuner. Typically TV tuner cards that are placed into a desktop box have the correct pieces on the card to encode the signals and keep that processing off your main processor. The TV tuner itself took around 50% of the capacity of my laptop processor. I have an AMD Turion Dual Core Processor with a 1.9 GHz rating per core. When I first got the tuner Orb was having difficulty with the TV listings and it took about a week before they had a fix that corrected the digital over the air listings in my area. Once I got the fix and set up my tuner I tried to stream the digital TV from my laptop to the Vunow Box. I got a few channels to stream to the box, but most of the channels pinned my computer processors at 100% and apparently failed orb from streaming the media to the Vunow Box. When it failed it said that the box could not recognized the format. The few channels I got to stream did look good and seemed to work nicely. There were some times of some video skipping and I'm pretty sure it was because my computer could not process all the data fast enough. Orb does have a personal video recording option on it and it should work well to set your recordings and after they are done recording you should then be able to successfully stream them to the Vunow Box. I have not been doing this because I have an over the air digital video recorder that I use in the living room. Please leave any comments if you have questions about certain orb features and how they work on the Vunow Box.

Streaming From Media Center

After exhausting the Internet features of the box I decided to look into the meat of this system, playing video files. I first started by using a small capacity thumb drive. This works perfectly the only problem I really encountered is that I ran out of space. Video files are large. I began to try to stream video over the UPNP server. The basic one they support is Media Center. The steps to set up the server are easy. You need to add the video files you want to share to the correct folder and go through the settings to allow media center to act as a server. The feed of the video is good quality. The problems I ran into with this setup is that you cannot pause the video feed using the box. There is no way to stop the video. This became annoying to the point I had to stop using this situation. Media Center Streaming works, but is not very practical.