DVD Jon’s doubleTwist Raises $5M and Releases PC Version

doubleTwist, the iTunes-for-everybody software that Lifehacker declared “May Be the Coolest Universal Media Manager Ever,” has raised $5 million in Series B funding and released a PC version. The funding comes from former Disney and Creative Artists Agency head Michael Ovitz, Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, Alex Zubillaga, Index Ventures and Northzone Ventures.

Previously, doubleTwist had raised $2.3 million from Index Ventures, and put out a Mac version of its software this February. Co-founder and CTO Jon Lech Johansen is famous for reverse engineering DVD CSS as a teenager. We broke the story of him trying to commercialize his content accessibility efforts back when doubleTwist was founded in 2006.

Today, doubleTwist feels a lot like iTunes, and manages all sorts of photos, videos and other media. What’s super cool is that it automatically converts videos between different formats so they can play on whatever device you plug in from RIM, Sony, LG, Apple (only on PCs), Motorola, HTC, Microsoft and Nokia. In the screenshot above you can see how it looks to sync a video from your hard drive to a plugged-in Android phone. There’s a (non-embeddable) video explanation on doubleTwist’s homepage.

doubleTwist has both private and public sharing options, as well as an automatically updating feed of shared items if you happen to have a bunch of geeky friends who’ve installed the app, too.