Take Your Home TV, Music and Video Everywhere - Coming Soon to a Treo 650 near you...

For a very long time now I have been waiting to see the first streaming video solution for the Treo 650 which was first demoed to me by Kinoma at the Palmsource DevCon back in June last year…

A release of the updated Kinoma Player with streaming video functionality is not yet ready and I am told that this is “still a bit of a distance away from shipping” but… Earlier today Orb Networks which provides a free and secure solution to instantly access all of your digital media everywhere you go announced its collaboration with Kinoma to “bring Treo 650 users on any mobile network instant enjoyment of all their home and Internet television, music and videos.”

According to Orb “Right from the Treo 650's native Blazer Web browser, users will be able to select home or Internet TV, music, or video content of any media format to stream to the Kinoma player. The free, award-winning Orb(TM) application installed on the user's Windows(R) XP PC transcodes the original content's media format when necessary and provides a stream at the appropriate bitrate for the user's mobile data connection.”

Having heard a lot about Orb before I decided to take the plunge and install their application now that I can look forward to it at some point actually working with my Treo – hopefully with a 3G Treo 700p soon…  Both the installation and basic setup on a spare PC at home (which I’ll use as my “Orb Server”) proved to be surprisingly easy and I was up and running in what felt like under 5 minutes.

Once Orb has been setup you will be able to access all the TV (with a tuner card installed on your Orb server PC), Audio, Photo and Video that you have from any web-connected PC or Treo anywhere.  I first tested the service on my laptop using a standard web browser (accessing it via http://my.orb.com) and it performed brilliantly and flawlessly – I was able to access all the files that I had previously chosen to share and even managed to stream and view a video_ts DVD file without any problem.

Next I naturally wanted to see what Orb looked and felt like on my Treo and so I launched Blazer pointing it to my.orb.  After a standard login I had my page show up perfectly with the listing of TV, Audio, Photo and Video files (below).

For testing purposes I opened an audio file by pressing the Play button on the Orb page which brought up the LiveStream.asx file below that currently no Treo application can play but this is the gap which the Kinoma Player promises to fill in the future…

Like me you may want to get started with Orb today simply to be ready when the Kinoma Player is released.  Kinoma will add the needed streaming audio and video capabilities to your Treo but in the meantime Orb is nonetheless a terrific application in its own right – I simply cannot wait for the combination of both applications…

Also, if you haven’t already done so you may want to look at another option for playing video on your Treo today using TCPMP.  Please read my latest post on this: Mobile DVD On Your Treo.

Treonauts always have a movie at hand…