NthCode Player Announced

NthCode … an embedded Linux consultancy … a contract software developer … and now (finally!), a product company.

That’s right, we just announced our first product, NthCode Player. NthCode Player is software electronics companies can embed in their DVD players, TVs, and other devices so consumers can seamlessly find and play media from their networked home computers and the Internet.

It’s really cool. Trust me. I designed it. My team built it. And I’m using it to listen to AC/DC on my Nokia N810 right now.

So, what’s it do? To get the basic idea, you can go visit the NthCode website or jump right to the YouTube video.

Or you can read my non-press-release about it from the NthCode website:

Hollywood creates movies, television, and music for big screens and big speakers — not laptop computers and mp3 players. Yet here we are, with our expensive TVs tuned to boring programs while we use our computers to watch videos and listen to music.

It shouldn’t be this way. And soon, it won’t need to be. Because, today, we’re announcing a revolutionary new product to solve this problem: NthCode Player.

What is NthCode Player? NthCode Player is software that electronics companies embed in their devices so DVD players, televisions, and other electronics can play videos and music from network-attached PCs and the Internet.

It’s super cool. Let me tell you why.

First, it’s zero configuration. Devices running NthCode Player automatically connect to home networks and don’t require installation of cumbersome PC software. Instead, users only need to enable sharing on the media folders of their Windows, Mac, or Unix PCs and NthCode Player automatically finds, indexes, and organizes all the videos and music inside.

But putting all the media on people’s PCs and laptops at their fingertips wouldn’t be great if they couldn’t play it all back. So NthCode Player supports just about every audio and video format used today (MPEG1-4, h264, rmvb, WMV, xVid, aac, flac, mp3, ogg, avi, mov, mkv, and more) at up to 1080p HD resolution on sufficiently capable
hardware. (Just about the only thing NthCode Player won’t play is DRM-protected content.)

Finding and playing videos and music in such an efficient and simple way provides a quantum leap in usability over other solutions existing in the market today. This is a huge, huge win for consumers.

In addition to playing media from home network devices, NthCode Player also plays videos and music distributed over the Internet. To do this, we’ve integrated our own web browser with a powerful streaming, download, and subscription engine so people can connect to Internet-based media guides to find and play the media they want.

NthCode Player’s browser uses the poweful WebKit engine, so sites like Gmail and Facebook all work great. But, more importantly, NthCode Player makes it possible for media portals to use the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript they know and love to create media guides that can be navigated using a remote control or touch screen.

Our media streaming and download engine supports all the common protocols: RTSP, HTTP, MMS, and BitTorrent. So consumers can navigate to the video or music they want inside NthCode Player’s easy to use browser and then click a link to start download or playback. And NthCode Player’s RSS subscription engine makes it easy to subscribe to
the growing number of audio podcasts and video shows on the Internet today.

Because NthCode Player is based on open Internet standards, content owners and providers don’t have to cut a deal with anyone to get distribution, and electronics companies aren’t limited to a single content provider or narrow geographic market. This means consumers will finally be able to stop cuddling up next to their laptops and start enjoying PC and Internet media on bigger screens and speakers.

Finally, at NthCode, we’ve leveraged our combined decades of embedded software development experience to engineer NthCode Player from the ground up to run efficiently on the same low-cost, low-power ARM, MIPS, and x86 hardware that powers home electronics today.

Like I said, it’s really cool.

NthCode Player is currently under active development. We are announcing NthCode Player now so that we can reach out to content and chipset partners as well as potential customers who are interested in building products using NthCode Player.

The screenshots and videos at NthCode.com form a demo of what NthCode Player can do today. Our target is a fully quality-assured software solution that manufacturers can leverage to quickly create affordable home media products that people love to use.

To find out more about NthCode Player, please contact us at player (at) nthcode (dot) com. Additional information, including our opt-in NthCode News mailing list, can be found at NthCode.com.