Rumor: Orb Place-Shifting App Coming to the iPhone
For iPhone-smitten media junkies, what could better than the ability to stream any song or video stored on your home system to your iPhone or iPod Touch?
That blue heaven may be here in a few days if the rumor being reported by The Register turns out to be true. Andrew Orlowski says that software maker Orb will debut an iPhone-ready web application for its place-shifting tech within a couple of days.
Orb lets you stream any song, movie, TV show or photo from a PC to any other internet-connected device like a laptop, smartphone or PDA. It’s like the SlingBox without the extra hardware. You just install the free Orb software on your PC (it’s Windows-only, folks) and hook up a TV tuner if you want to capture shows, and you’re in business. There’s a web interface for queueing up media to stream, but all you need for playback on a device is a suitable media player.
The rumored iPhone app will run access an Orb-powered build of Winamp to handle the playback — see the video below.
As the Register notes, "Apple stealthily blocks applications that use RTSP, the standard mobile streaming protocol. It will deliver your streams in MP4 instead." Which is totally fine if it means we can watch our entire collection of Doctor Who episodes on our iPhones. No, Mr. Editor, I’m not slacking off, I’m testing software.
So, what do you think, legit? Horse puckey?
[iPhone screenshot via The Register]
