Sunday, November 18, 2007

Improvment Ideas for TVersity Universal Media Server

TVersities Mission Statement
  • Our mission is to empower individuals to organize and personalize their home and Internet multimedia collection (audio, video and images) and have universal access to it anywhere (at the home or on the go) anytime and from any device.
1) TVersity received some great press coverage recently within the UK, courtesy of PC Pro and specifically the October 2007 edition with the feature on The web's best 50 free downloads Where Tversity was included in the entertainment category.

I was extremely honored to see that the combination of a thumbnail of a photo that I took in Moscow last year, being personally viewed on (my) "Mikes Nokia 770", whilst using the Media Streamer application; was included in the magazine to promote the use of the TVersity Server on a Nokia Internet Tablet. (Captured image that I originally provided to the TVersity team)


Fig 1) Image from the October 2007, PC Pro Magazine.


"Up to Date" information on what is being said in the press, about TVersity can be found here.

2) At the time of writing this particular blog post the TVersity Media server is now at Version 0.9.11.2 (November 11, 2007) moving closer to the switch from beta to a full blown software release. For a clearer understanding of TVersities improving capabilities with the development path to date, a good place to start is the Release notes.


From it's core internet and local media serving and transcoding capabilities to all networked enabled media player (large or small) it is clear that TVersity is maturing very well.

Album Art and Lyrics visualisation are area's that have not been tackled in beta releases to date. Fig 1 & 2 are are my simple interpretation of how these capabilities could look within the Tversity Flash Player interface,

Fig 2) "Mock-up" of Album Art in the TVersity Flash Player Interface.



Fig 3) "Mock-up" of Lyrics in the TVersity Flash Player Interface.


With both Album Art and Lyrics I would like to see TVersity fully capable of sourcing this data either directly from the Internet or from within the users own media files and/or folder structure.

Good examples of software that interact with Internet enabling enhanced user visualisation on their personally purchased media are:-
Another area that I would dearly love to see both TVersity and the developers of Players that interface with the Media Server is the ability to control two independent players in such a manner that play order and playback can be manipulated between each player with crossfade in-out facilities.


Fadeamp (above) is a plugin which enables crossfade and control of two independent running versions of Winamp playing different selected media content through the same audio output device. If this idea could be applied with the flash Player interface of TVersity, just think how this could revolutionise media playback on all the devices Tversity supports.

It is my wish, that these ideas are added to TVersities arsenal of features in the future.

1 comment:

Ronen said...

Thanks Mike. This is great feedback. We know we need to support Album Art and we will.
Controlling other devices has been on our list of todos for a while now. I would like to think that it will be added soon as well, but I am not sure about this one.
Thanks again for sending us these photos of the 770 media streamer. No one could have guessed that they will end up published in PC Pro.