Jon Lech Johansen, best known for his work on reverse-engineering the CSS encryption on DVDs, is no fan of the technical and DRM barriers that stand between us, our content, and our devices. Pursuing the goal of tearing down these walls, Johansen’s new company has released doubleTwist, an ambitious media organizer and service that can sync content between a wide variety of gadgets; it also helps you share files with friends. It’s iTunes meets YouTube, and the iPod is no longer the only VIP.

When Johansen announced doubleTwist as an extremely early Windows beta a year ago, it was a media manager that could organize music, photos, and video, but it also did DRM-stripping and Facebook file sharing. “Our goal is to provide a simple and well integrated solution,” said co-founder Monique Monique Farantzos at the time, “that the average consumer can use to eliminate the headaches associated with their expanding digital universe.” When we looked at doubleTwist in February 2008, it could recognize files like DRMed iTunes media on an iPod, clean MPEG4 video from your cell phone, and everything in between. It could then sync that media back to your desktop or another device, performing any conversions or DRM-stripping as required. “One media library manager to rule them all” was the idea, and while doubleTwist scaled back somewhat for this public Mac OS X beta, it’s still quite an interesting product.

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