What is the alternate option for orb on linux?

[Gaelic]

Hey guys i recently started using Ubuntu on one of my systems. I have Windows XP on my desktop and using a wonderful software called orb on it. This amazing application allows you to login to your personal computer remotely from anywhere,anytime and stream your music and videos. More importantly you can stream it to your Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360.
The advantage of this is that you can go to a webpage and stream your music and movies through a flash player inbuilt in it from computer to that particular browser. This is so cool because now we can watch or listen to our collection from our computer on our consoles very easily. My question is that is there an alternative for orb on Linux considering orb is a windows only application.

[Lillebror]

Well for Linux you have a good alternative. MPD is a music player daemon. What this actually means is that it runs in the background and responds to shell commands. You can also call it responding to graphical user interface commands, which in this case is phpmp2. It can accept connections from clients to send them the audio output in OGG format. Icecast2 is a streaming daemon that is able to streaming daemons and cast them over the various networks. Audio applications such as VLC , amarok can connect to the streaming daemon such as Icecast2 through HTTP and then play the music on your remote computer. Thus MPD and Icecast2 together can do what orb does for you on Windows very easily.

[Dr. V]

Well as the above poster suggested you can use MPD and Icecast2 together as an alternate option. But don't worry that is not your only option. You have one more alternative. It is called as Jinzora. This is nothing but simply a php script that lives on your webserver or your desktop computer in this case. It can be secured with a login and password in terms of security measures. It will manage your library and will give the output in .m3u format. This can be opened by your preferred music application. The stream comes through the HTTP and the format will be whatever is the files format such as mp3,aac etc. This basically gives you access to your media on any device with a web browser. Hope this helps,good luck.

[Humberto]

A simplified solution is using a mp3 serving program like gnump3d. This eliminates the need for you to depend on external applications like jinzora. It is available in the universal repositories. One thing to keep in mind while using it is to change the location of log to somewhere in your native folder in the gnump3d.conf file. What this does is it enables you to run gnump3d without root. Then you just add gnump3d to your start up programs and you can access your songs from anyplace you want at any time. Do not forget to open up port 8888 on your firewall for this to work. You can even password protect it as a security option.

[jesse]

Well i have use gnump3d and i can assure you it is easy to install and use it. But there is no way to protect your music from unauthorized access from unknown people. GNUmp3d works like a server and makes everything that is in the directory whether its movie or music accessible if you know the url for it. The password feature is only for the page displaying the music and not for the stream. Even this option has been taken away in the latest release. Jinzora is actually really nice and supports multiple user access,control and has a lot more features compared to GNUmp3d. Check out subsonic written in java which is a very nice program as well, zina is another option you can give a try.

[MrChris-]

With orb recently releasing a Iphone viewer application, i am giving serious thought to running orb on VMware or possibly going back to Windows for my home theater personal computer device. I prefer to run mythtv on Ubuntu but being able stream all my movies, videos, songs etc on my iphone by using EDGE or wifi would definitely come in to consideration. JapelServer, oxyl-box are some of the other alternative now available. Mind you they are not as polished as orb but options none the less for Linux based operating systems. JapelServer does live transcoding but the limitation is that you cannot allow space in movie names and the files have to be on a local hard drive.