I am not a big gamer at all in fact I hardly play any video games at all. I do occasionally spend an hour playing Call of Duty 2 on the laptop but even that is not enough to make me any kind of gamer, in fact I watch movies a lot more.
A couple of years back people told me how great modded Xboxes were for streaming movies to the TV and since I have a “couple of movies” on my PCs and some music as well I though it would be nice to steam from the computer to a Xbox. The wife though is not a fan of any video games so I had to rely on my two young kids to get me there at some point.
My son is now 4 and my daughter turns 8 in a week and true to form my young son has taken to video games like any young boy does so I have an ally. I did borrow an Xbox last year from a guy at work but it did not go over so well at home.
At Christmas my son got a Nintendo Wii and the whole family has been playing playing but no one more then my son so now I have had my chance to try and stream movies to the Wii and thanks to an article on Lifehacker I had a chance to check it out.
I have my Wii setup to my home network, actually it was an easy setup on Christmas day wit ha couple of clicks of the controller, and a couple of nights ago I downloaded the Opera browser to the Wii. On the Wii the internet is a channel called the Internet Channel and all this is to the Wii is downloading the Opera browser and it works right away. I had to buy Wii points which is 1000 points for $10 and the browser itself is 500 points or $5 so I have a bit of a credit left. After the Wii Opera browser install I went to a couple of sites and then later in the evening I went to the Orb site and downloaded that streaming application for the desktop computer.
After I had installed Orb and told it what folders to look in the program indexed my folders and allows me to go to mycast.orb.com to get a listing of all of the software from any machine after logging in. This process is becoming more popular but in essence the Orb site does the DNS redirect to my machine based on the credentials that I log onto their site with. Very interesting idea and I am sure we will see a lot more of this.
Anyway, off topic again, sorry, I went to the TV last night, booted up the Wii, went to the Internet Channel and after logging into mycast.orb.com and signing in I had access to video, music, rss feeds and more though Orb on the PC a few feet away from the TV.
I so far have only played with the video and was a little disappointed with the framerate. It look like I am getting very clear audio but only about 15 frames per second or so on the video, so not so good for watching TV shows or movies. I am looking forward to checking out everything else that Orb has to offer this weekend and then will update again with more on this on Monday.
