MacWorld Expo 09: Interview with Christian Rüb from Equinux

equinux is a German company, with offices in San Francisco, that developed several products for the Mac, most of them being media-oriented: such as "Media Central", a media center for the Mac, TV with TheTube, TV tuner with TubeStick, music with CoverScout and the brand new SongGenie.
We met Christian Rüb to discuss about new and future products from Equinux.

TheTube offers basic functionalities expected by most users with a single mono-window, most likely to look different than the competing applications eyeTV from elgato. The tuner is available in European version (digital terrestrial TV, DVB-T/DTT) and in US version ("TubeStick hybrid", analog and digital).
Unlike eyeTV offering a double tuner, TubeStick only offers a single tuner. According to Christian Rüb, this is a strategic choice: Equinux is a small company and can currently not deal with too many hardware diversity, so they concentrate on large key market with high potential.
The new Equinux products for early 2009 are 2 iPhone applications which should be released soon: TubeToGo (currently reviewed by Apple) and Live TV. Both are free. TubeToGo is an application allowing users to watch their recorded video via internet. IT looks similar to the video streaming option for iPhone offered by elgato, however equinux version is not limited to local network.

How does it work? It is relatively simple: you can setup TheTube to automatically upload some programs to a dedicated online storage space, via MobileMe or via FTP on an ISP or your own server. Once the recording completed, TheTube upload it to the server and updates the library file describing the different programs available. It is then easy to use TubeToGo from your iPhone to browse the library. The quality of encoding is rather, but the streaming to the iPhone will strongly depends on your bandwidth (you will need 3G network). You can also program the recording of a show from your iPhone, and it will be automatically uploaded to the server once completed. In addition, you can get access to the TubeToGo interface via your favorite web browser, so you can watch your videos from any computer. The preferences allow you to define if you can share a video with others, or if it is private contents.
LiveTV as intended by its name, gives you the possibility to watch TV on your iPhone, by streaming from your local network (requiring TheTube). If idea and the associated functions are interesting, the video quality is currently rather poor. According to equinux, this is a compromise between performance, quality and battery lifetime of the iPhone, better video quality would drain power too quickly.

Those two application initially developed independently will most likely be merged in the future.
Concerning MediaCentral, the equinux media-center solution, the application did not really evolved over the last 2 years, and while equinux is currently thinking of a new version, especially the interface, there is currently no defined date for a new release.
If you are a music addict and control freak, and particularly hate to get iTunes albums without the dedicated cover, you probably tried CoverScout:

With the version 3, the interface has completely been revised, and is now displaying an iApps design. However, changes made by Apple in the code, prevent you to add metadata to the music track as it used to be possible with version 2.0 of CoverScout. Equinux is working on this problem, expecting that apple will give them green light to fix it.
The other new product from Equinux has just been announced prior the MacWorld: SongGenie. It allows you to add information on all those music tracks floating around in your iTunes library, and usually tagged as "Track 1 - Untitled Album - Unknown Artist".

SongGenie works similarly to Shazam: it scans the music track, then compares the music signature with a music database provided by MusicIP. According to Equinux, the system is reliable in 80-85% of the search, and as with Shazam, you might have problem to tag your old recordings ripped from vinyl disc. Once the file identified, you simply need to give SongGenie the right to add all information to the selected tracks, then you can recover the missing cover with CoverScout, or index them with Genius.