By Evan Ackerman
Digital media is all over the place, in all kinds of different formats, and it’s often a huge pain in the ass to get it from one place to another, especially if the internet is involved. doubleTwist is an attempt to make all of your media play nice, especially with other people in social networking environments like Facebook. The idea is that the doubleTwist software will read all of your media, and make it available in one integrated, web-friendly place, doing all of the necessary reformatting and transcoding behind the scenes. You can then trade media back and forth with your friends just by dragging and dropping onto their online profiles.
As for DRM… doubleTwist was developed in part by the guy responsible for cracking DVD encoding as well as Apple’s FairPlay DRM. However, stripping DRM isn’t what this software is about. It will remove DRM from your iTunes music, sort of, but all it does it play the song in the background on mute while re-recording it to MP3, which you can do by yourself. And you have to have legally purchased and be authorized to play the iTunes music before it’ll do a thing. So, despite the root of doubleTwist, don’t expect it to perform any DRM miracles. Shame.
At this stage, doubleTwist supports relatively few (albeit the most common) file formats, and a limited number of devices. Also, the file sharing limits (when it comes to size and length) are quite restrictive. It’s a good idea and it’s completely free to download (it’s in beta at the moment), but if you’re serious about your media, you’ll probably want to keep messing with it the old fashioned way. For now, at least.
[ doubleTwist ] VIA [ Crave ]
