I figured after all these years, surely there would be a lot of choices for those that want to stream music and videos from their home computer to their work computer or mobile device.  Well, turns out that I was wrong.  The background is this, though I really like Pandora and Last.FM, sometimes I just want to hear some of my own tunes.  I am one of those people that like to put all my music on one device to always have with me so I don't have to reconnect and remove and add music.  When I had my Zune, I put in the 80gb drive just so I could accomplish this.  Then I bought my crappy Samsung i-760 phone and realized I could put my music on there.  Well, that is nice except I only get 8gb of space on that tiny little card, that just didn't cut it. 

 That is when I switched to Pandora and Last.FM, however sometimes I want control over what I am listening too, or I want to hear a whole album, so that just didn't work.  The problem I had to solve was how to stream my music from home to work, when at work we block almost every port except the basics, so I need something that runs on port 80.  At this point, I found Vibe Streamer and Orb.  The biggest difference off the bat is Vibe Streamer only handles music, whereas Orb handles music, photos, videos. 

So, at first I started with Vibe Streamer.  It was easy to install, I put a mapping in my router to route traffice to my computer, and played music stored on my freenas server.  Worked great.  The interface was really good, easy to create on the fly playlists, etc. Everything plays as a flash file, so no need to worry about codecs.  The downside with Vibe is it does not work on mobile devices, and does not play videos.  The videos really doesn't bother me too much, though it would be nice to have.  The fact that it doesn't play on my windows mobile device though was kind of annoying.   Vibe does not run as a service, which to be honest is pretty stupid.  It does have a setting to load automatically on startup, but on 2 seperate computers that has not worked.  Plus, the app has to be loaded with an icon on the taskbar, would prefer it to be a background task.  There is a way through the windows resource kit to have it run as a service, I will be testing that later.  As far as I know, there is no iphone app to work with this, or any mobile device for that matter, at least until they have flash support.

After a hard drive crash and a system rebuild, I decided to give Orb a shot.  Orb, though runs on your local machines, has its hands in the orb.com servers.  No worries, your music and files stay on your own computer, I think they just keep a list for quicker management.  Once I installed the software and logged into my orb account, I was instantly pretty confused.  I just wanted to play my music.  Eventually I got it figured out, I think it was just running slow because it was still indexing my files.  The first thing to note is, on my system, everything runs in Windows Media Player instead of flash.  Personally, I don't like media player as it seems slow to buffer and play.  I have noticed a longer than expected pause between songs, and a lot of times when the song starts up it starts in almost a slow motion sound then picks up to regular speed.  The web interface I think is pretty clugy.  I have not figured out how to just quickly add songs to my list that I want to listen too, or randomize play.  More importantly, to me, is I can not see what is currently playing, unless I look at the window media player window.  We tested ORB on an iphone.  We can watch videos through the free iphone app, but you have to pay $10 to be able to listen to music.

I then tried to watch a video on my phone on the train.  Now, keep in mind, my Samsung i-760 is a piece of junk and has terrible reception, the video did not use the whole screen and was really choppy and was just continually trying to buffer.   Orb is nice here because it detects your connection rate and adjusts the video before playing it, but I think because my phone is a piece of junk that it just does not maintain a constant connection rate.  Would like to hear from others on the video on phones.

So, my overall opinion?  Well, I will be reinstalling Vibe Streamer for my music.  The interface was just that much better and easier to use.  When I switch to a google phone sometime early next year, I may try Orb again, or I may just have orb run on another port altogether, if that is even an option. 

Vibe streamer can be found at: www.vibestreamer.com
Orb can be found at: www.orb.com

Please let me know if you have found something better!