sarahintampa

A man who goes by the name of "DVD Jon," gained fame for cracking both the DVD code and Apple’s FairPlay. Now he’s offering a new software application, called DoubleTwist, that allows for sharing of any music, photo, or video file on any portable media player as well across social networks. The CEO of DoubleTwist, Monique Farantzos, recruited Jon (Jon Lech Johansen) to build the software, which he and 10 others have worked on for 8 months.

How easy is the software? Says Jon, "the goal is to make something your parents can use." To use the software, a device is plugged into a Windows XP or Vista PC (Mac will be later) and DoubleTwist will recognize it and all the media files on the device. Using the software, the file can then be selected, dragged, and dropped into DoubleTwist to be synched up to a separate device, or shared with your friends on DoubleTwist.

The app will also work with Facebook and soon all OpenSocial platforms, allowing users to share media across social networks. Using the Facebook app TwistMe, Facebook users can drag and drop media into a box on another user’s Facebook profile. The friend will then see the shared files show up in their DoubleTwist client. They also automatically add audio and video files you receive from friends to your iTunes library. Shared photos will also be added if you enable iTunes photo sync.

DoubleTwist currently recognizes the following file types:

• Video: 3gp (used by most cell phones), MPEG4 (.mp4, .m4v), wmv, avi and MPEG2 (.mpg, .mpv, .mpeg)
• Audio: mp3, aac/m4a, wma, wav
• Pictures: jpg, gif, png, bmp

DoubleTwist currently supports the following devices:

• Nokia N Series phones
• Sony Ericsson Walkman & Cybershot phones
• LG Viewty phones
• Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0 phones (e.g. Treo, HTC, Palm)
• Sony PSP
• Amazon Kindle

DoubleTwist will also recognize your iTunes playlists and will detected which ones are DRM’d. To decode them, the software plays the song in the background (without volume) while re-recording the files as MP3s. (This sounds like a good way to convert your iTunes files to MP3s, too, doesn’t it?)

You can download DoubleTwist for free, spyware-free from here.

(found on Cnet)

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