Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Using Orb to share photos, videos

I've been messing around with Orb as a possible replacement for posting some photos on Blogger (the nephew's photo blog), and potentially all of my genealogy-related scans at RootsWeb, and hopefully for the few video files I've put on Ourmedia. An alternative is much needed because I don't look forward to using Blogger for multiple-photo posts and Ourmedia isn't very fast at times.

After installing Orb and specifying which folders to share, you can then notify people about what files you're sharing. It's a pretty simple process. The catch is that your computer needs to be running for others to see the files you're sharing. While that may not be a problem for many, finding enough time around here to remain continually online for users to browse at their leisure is a little tricky, what with severe weather occurring often in the Midwest. I also don't leave the computer running while I'm gone for more than a few hours. If I could find a way to overcome the connectivity issue, I'd use Orb exclusively to distribute photos and stop uploading to the nephew's blog in a heartbeat. It works that well.

Videos are a different story. Orb streams videos from the host system to the user and unless your ISP has a high upload cap it will be an extremely annoying visual experience.

I haven't tested how well audio streams, but will try that later this week. I'm falling behind on podcasts -- haven't listened to The Genealogy Guys in two or three weeks! -- and if I can do that elsewhere without taking files with me, that would be great.

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