Sunday, April 29, 2012

It is an app world and 2.1 is here

We are very excited to announce the availability of TVersity Media Server version 2.1. The 2.x versions (2.0 and 2.1 so far) bring a number of notable improvements under the hood, while making no GUI changes. Of most interest is the complete rewrite of our real-time transcoding engine with the following main benefits over the previous implementation:
  • It works correctly disregarding the codec pack installed and even when codec hell is prevalent on the system.
  • It can now utilize Windows Foundation codecs and demuxers and not just DirectShow (Windows 7 only).
  • It now converts only audio or only video when possible, thus requiiring less system resources and maintaining the original quality of the source materials.
  • It chooses the most appropriate audio language (for MKV and DIVX) when multiple audio tracks exist with different languages and the most appropriate subtitle language (for MKV) when multiple subtitle languages exist.
  • It takes into account the system capabilities when determing transcoding paramters by executing a transcodng benchmark the first time the software runs after an installation.
A lot has changed in the software world ever since TVersity got started. Most notably the concept of app stores came to exist and people habits have changed. It is no longer outrageous for consumers to pay a few dollars for software, even for little apps that were developed in a few days. In the same time it is quite unusual to pay for high end software more than twenty dollars or so. For that reason we are changing our economic model with version 2.0 and we are reducing the price of the Pro version from $39.99 to $19.99. Our non Pro version, which used to be free, will be called Basic from now on and will cost a few dollars. We feel that this is more in line with today's world and would love to hear what you think.