[General Topics] Menneisyys:
1.4 Transcoders

Now, let’s elaborate on all the transcoder alternatives.

1.4.1 Orb

Currently, the most widely known and popular transcoder (and generic radio streaming) service is that of Orb. It is hugely popular with both the Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone folks. It certainly deserves this: while, in some cases, it’s definitely lacking, the web access module it provides is by far the best of all. And, it not only allows for transcoding radio stations, but also accessing the files on your desktop computer and streaming multimedia files from there – as if they were located on your handset.

After installing, if you want to add your own radio stations to Orb, right-click the Orb icon in the Windows tray in the lower right corner, select Configuration and go to the Media tab. There, click the Add button in the “Music” group to add the directory of your playlist files.

They’ll, then, be shown under Audio / Playlists:

Of course, under Audio / Internet Radio, you’ll still see the radio stations shipping with Orb – you might also want to take a look at them.

I REALLY recommend giving Orb a try. Even if you don’t start to actively use it (because of the severe Orb restrictions and the vast superiority of the HE-AAC v2 format (Orb only uses the “dumbest” AAC-LC)), it’s still worth paying a try.

1.4.1.1 Restrictions of Orb

If you take a look at the online Settings / Stream page of Orb, you see it offers several output stream types:

(Incidentally, it’s this page that allows for selecting the streaming format. All this when accessed from a mobile browser like Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile, Nokia Web on Symbian or Opera Mobile on both operating systems.)

As can clearly be seen, WMA, RealAudio, some 3G formats (ALL in RTSP!), Winamp PLS and Flash are supported. Unfortunately, many of them (the 3G formats and RealAudio) are RTSP-only, which means they are completely useless if your mobile operator uses NAT’ing – that is, doesn’t expose your handset directly to the Internet.

As far as the Flash support of Orb is concerned, on Windows Mobile, the Flash player (screenshot running under Opera Mobile), while it starts with the official, latest MM7 Flash player plug-in, crashes after about 10 seconds when used from the built-in Internet Explorer (tested on two devices). On Opera Mobile 8.65, it keeps playing; however, it utilizes the CPU at 100% as can clearly be seen in HERE. And, in addition to the huge CPU usage, it also has a major problem: it uses a temporary file in the built-in storage of the device, which will, sooner or later, result in the storage’s entirely filling up and stopping / crashing the machine. A screenshot of these temporary files is HERE. Flash Lite 2.1 is totally incompatible with Orb’s Flash streams as can also be seen in HERE.

Under Symbian, it doesn’t even start under the “old” but still official Flash Lite 2 support of Nokia Web as can also be seen in HERE.

All in all, under the two mobile operating systems, using the Flash mode is in no way recommended.

Also note that the Winamp .pls format it offers internally just uses WMA streams – don’t think it’s a SHOUTcast-compatible stream meaning compatibility with Nokia Internet Radio / LCG Jukebox on Symbian or with many SHOUTcast clients (GSPlayer etc.) on Windows Mobile.

Two compatibility charts follow, which show the two major mobile operating systems in both NAT’ed and non-NAT’ed (direct) cases:

Windows Mobile: