Some cool things we are working on

On-the-fly transcoding has always been one of the unique features of TVersity. Thanks to this features you could play almost any media on any supported device, disregarding the limitations of the device. For those of you that are new to TVersity, we introduced the notion of on-the-fly transcoding in our very first release back in 2005. In fact TVersity was the first home media server ever to offer that feature.

Today On-the-fly transcoding has become a must have feature for end users, and even Microsoft is doing some of that on Windows 7 -  a great validation of our approach. Of-course the transcoding capability offered by Microsoft in 2010 and on Windows 7 only, is roughly equivalent to what we offered in 2005 for all Windows versions.

Since that time we have been constantly improving our transcoding engine and introduced things like on-the-fly transcoding of Internet content, transcoding for mobile devices and a server side web browser (which allows us to transcode full or partial content of a web page with Flash video and deliver it to your devices and your TV).

On the mobile front however, one important feature was missing - we could not transcode videos on the fly for the iPhone. Initially it was technically impossible to deliver media converted on the fly to the quicktime player built into the iPhone. However in iPhone OS 3.0 Apple introduced the notion of live HTTP streaming and suddenly it became possible to do that. The recent introduction of the iPad (which also supports live HTTP streaming) triggered us to leverage this capability.

Once again we are pushing the boundaries of what a home media server is, and incorporating into TVersity features that are typically found in high-end enterprise level streaming solutions.

The videos embedded in this post are demonstrating some of the features of our upcoming release:

• Play any format on the iPhone or iPad without requiring a manual format conversion.

• Utilize our server side web browser (based on Webkit and more specifically on Google Chrome / Chromium) to stream the content of any web page with Flash video to the iPhone and iPad. This of-course includes Hulu.

These features will be available in TVersity Pro 1.9 which is due in a few weeks, so please stay tuned.