Yesterday’s other big news was the beta release of DVD Jon‘s DoubleTwist software – that aims to be the Swiss army knife of multimedia conversion, sharing, and syncing. The feature (rightfully) garnering the most attention is the behind-the-scenes conversion of DRM-ed iTunes into unprotected MP3s for playlist synchronization onto non-iPods. Though, being a video geek my first experiments were with TiVo content…
On a fairly clean Windows XP install (TiVo Desktop, minimal codecs), DoubleTwist was unable to play TiVoToGo content. In fact, the program didn’t see the video files (or directory) until I changed the file extension from .tivo to .mpeg. And as you can see above, once found, DoubleTwist doesn’t utilize TiVo’s .dll during playback. I was interested in seeing what would happen when syncing TiVo video to my iPhone and Nokia N95 as a possible free replacement for TiVo Desktop Plus, but I discovered device synchronization is currently limited to audio files.
Speaking of that N95, DoubleTwist immediately identified the photos and videos I’ve shot – had I wanted to share them with someone. Though, that brings up a problem (for me) with this software. I imagine DVD Jon is a nice guy, but the required online registration and service connectivity is a major turn off. I want to convert, sync, and possibly share privately.