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Forum Discussion
MindBender
Aug 12, 2011Aspirant
What happened to Orb?
Orb was one of the secondary reasons why I selected a ReadyNAS Pro 6 as my new NAS a couple of months ago. Unfortunately the joy was short lived: Orb was very unstable and producing a lot of exception...
MindBender
Nov 08, 2011Aspirant
gibxxi wrote: Like I said above, Plex and Skifta work fine on the ReadyNAS. So the flaky Orb add-on is more a reflection on the people who developed the add-on (I'm guessing; The Orb people themselves) and the way it was implemented. The Orb add-on regularly crashed scanning even moderate size libraries.
I just discovered Orb is developed in India, that explains it all. If you are a software developer (like me) and you have experience with India, Indians and their software (of which I have a lot), you would keep at least 20 meters (that's 65 feet, in Mickey Mouse units) clearance from their work to avoid being killed, wounded, hurt or just being in plain agony. Let alone putting it on your server containing everything digital you own.
gibxxi wrote: I don't get any problems with Plex or Skifta along these lines. And even Subsonic has ceased crashing on me since I did a factory reset with the latest stable x86 Firmware in place. I believe the support for this add-on was all from the Orb people, not Netgear
That explains the lack of support.
gibxxi wrote: So it's withdrawl / failure to work would be an issue for them to answer for, and not Netgear, although I do sympathise with people who bought a ReadyNAS expressly for that purpose. In such instances, a statement to the effect that the add-on had been withdrawn probably wouldn't of been to much to ask for from Netgear, even if they weren't responsible for it's development. So I sympathise with you on that point.
Well, it was introduced with lots of noise, and a really nice feature it was. We all hoped the stability problems would be dealt with it time, but it never got that far: Support was pulled within 9 months. The iOS app was with €9,99 relatively expensive and it stopped working after 2 months already. They should have warned ReadyNAS users not to upgrade, because no downgrade was possible. And we're waiting for the promised ReadyNAS version already longer than the working version has ever worked. It's actually very strange they need a separate version: they're software structure is probably too warped up to implement a superset and a subset of their protocol.
gibxxi wrote: But Like I said, there are better alternatives already available for this NAS. And if your not to worried by the "old-school" look of the ReadyNAS web GUI, the actual hardware itself is easily on a par with any other vendor's offerings, if not superior. I couldn't be happier with My Ultra 4, and most of the "issues" i've come across have been down to me.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding Skifta's functionality, but I have used Orb to watch my media library on my iOS devices: I don't see how Skifta can replace that functionality.
Plex wasn't out when I checked out Skifta, but you're completely right: Plex is awesome! It's completely replacing Orb and it offers exactly the same functionality in a much prettier interface. I'm assuming it's more stable than Orb too, because less or equally 'stable' would be a statistical aberration. So: Out with Orb, in with Plex! It's installing as I'm typing this.
All folks wanting to know more can check out this link:
http://www.readynas.com/?p=5523
And the add-on can be downloaded from this link:
http://www.plexapp.com/linux/linux-pms-download.php
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