I agree with the above posts. I run a media center PC with 400 gigs of media and it is so much easier to run music and video and live tv off of the actual GUI rather than ORB's clunky interface. I think ORB is a great thing, but for me it worked great when it worked, but too often failed when I was on the road and needed it. I've never been unable to sling.

After reading more about Orb it seems that you can do the same things that you can do with a Slingbox. The price of the equipment needed is about the same in cost so that only leaves the issue of quality. Does anyone have any opinions as to which one is better?

I have orb and though I can't say if it's better or worse quality wise than the slingbox, it's quite good. Better than I expected, although there is at least a 15 sec delay which when watching sports could pose a bit of an anoyance. I am not sure if slingbox has this problem also. I however am switching to slingbox since I like that I can hook it up to my DVR and cable box. I know this is possible with orb as well but with the slingbox it seems much easier.

Another thing to consider is that the price of equipment isn't nessesarily the same. If you want a great tuner for your PC then yeah it's near the same but I baught just a regular TV Wonder Pro, I believe it was $60 at the time and that works fine with orb.

Hi..

I actually used ORB for a few months prior to obtaining a sling box.

Here are some facts and my opinions:

You can do a few more things with ORB than you can with slingbox:

1. View/listen to video and audio files straight from your hosting ORB server (or attached file spaces)

2. Spend lots of quality time tweaking all the caching, video, network and other various controls to eek out the most frames per second.

3. Multiple viewers attached (but quality degrades)

With sling you can essentially only have access to two sources

1. The coax source
2. Any other source you can attach via RCA (Red, Yellow, White) cables.

I have mine connected straight to coax and to my Tivo.

So I can either watch it straight out of the "pipe" (cable) or go view recorded shows on my tivo.

I was a member of the Beta test team for the Sling Mobile Player..and tested it exclusively on the PPC-6700 .


I can honestly say in my case that the Slingbox performed much better and has a nice optimizaiton algorithm for sending video. I average around 170Kbs to 200 Kbs via EVDO (in my north houston location).

While the Slingbox player is proprietary it is VERY well built and the Slingbox guys still have their attention focused on what customers are saying and asking for (vs. 80% of the rest of the product vendors in the world).

I once did a test of using the Slingbox player on my laptop while utilizing my Treo 650 as my uplink..while only getting 70 to 80 Kbs .and giving the slingplayer about 30 seconds to optimize (aka cache) it's stream..i was watching the same quality video I would on a much higher bandwidth connection.

In my book Slingbox is the easy carefree way to go..while (unless you have the parts) dedicate another whole PC, cable card, OS and who knows how many hours managing to keep up to do video.

Slingbox is solid state (no moving parts) device...it's a no brainer in my opinion $250 well spent.. 20 minutes top installation..and you're set.

Now if I can just justify getting another because my wife hogs it all the time for herself via her PPC... what has the world come to

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Palm sure feels better...but Microsoft can multitask :)

Slingbox is EASY to set up AND works flawlessly. Orb on the other hand (and I'm sure it's probably something that I am doing or not doing) doesn't seem to want to cooperate with me very easily.

To me, paying the $250 for sling even if I had hardware compatible with orb is the way to go. I just need to stream my mp3 collection to sling somehow...


EDIT: I finally have orb working (figures) however I am only using it to stream my audio collection and it is working without a hitch for audio at 1x. So for me I'll be using sling with my ReplayTV and Live Cable and use ORB for audio... Cheers!

"I can honestly say in my case that the Slingbox performed much better and has a nice optimizaiton algorithm for sending video. I average around 170Kbs to 200 Kbs via EVDO (in my north houston location)."

I read that a lot of people are having problems obtaining speeds over 150 kbs when using a ppc 6700 via EVDO. How is the picture quality when you're down at 170kps? Most people on the Slingbox forums say that anything below 200kps is unacceptable.

I have run the gammot, from 50k up to 400+k (w/ wifi). I can tell you that even w/ about 150-170k I have experienced 20fps and the quality is pretty good still at this lower (vs 200+) speed.

Orb works fine for me and now I can search my home pc for data files like spreadsheets, text or others I might need while on the road. And its FREE!

I've used both for streaming media, although never used Orb for TV. My room gets hot enough between all my other devices being on constantly, I don't want another one running just so I can watch TV. I found Slingbox for under $200 from Dell (nice promo) and am pretty happy with it. Hookup couldn't be any easier. I think I was up and running in 10 minutes. It's not so boring at work anymore...

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Sprint PPC-6700 EV-DO ROM + AKU 3.3 hack
Slingplayer Mobile w. Oakley RazrWIRE & Moto HT820
Kingston 2GB MiniSD

How are you connected when you're at work? I'm interested in knowing what kind of speeds people are getting ove EVDO since that's what I would be using.

I'm not at all familiar with Slingbox. I've read about Orb a little, but it was a while ago and I'm sure it's probably changed a lot since then.

I'm going to be getting 2 Sprint PPC-6700's. 1 for me, 1 for the wife. We have Dish Network at home, with the DVR receivers. I have no problem putting together a dedicated PC (or 2) to run orb or Slingbox or whatever.

What would you guys suggest I get? Which one works best with Dish Network receivers? is there any way to watch the DVR stuff stored on the Dish receiver with either Orb or Slingbox? Is there any way my wife and i could both be watching something different at the same time?

And as far as accessing spreadsheets and stuff, as someone else posted, I had no idea this was possible with Orb. Is it Orb making this possible, or are you using something else to do it? Is it secure? is it hard to set up?

Thanks in advance...