About Mediachance company

About MediaChance

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Mediachance is a privately owned company that has been creating multimedia, video, DVD authoring, audio, and graphic and writing software since 1998. Which sounds suspiciously respectable when written like that (and with two ‘and’) Today, Mediachance has an extensive portfolio of well-received Windows applications, built over many years by simply making useful software and getting on with it.

Mediachance / Cranky Man Software

Japanese version of DVD-lab with Pegasys INC

DVD-lab was included with Pioneer DVR-A07XL (for Australian market)

Real-Draw PRO as a part of PHOTO IMPACT PRO 13

Examples of BeckerDRAW in Spain, Netherland and France (SuperDraw)

We worked closely with Pegasys-inc, Japanese maker of TMPGenc to bring advanced DVD authoring software (DVD-lab) to Japanese market. Mediachance acquired assets of PureMotion, the UK maker of video editing application Edit Studio (then offered it as a bundle with DVD-lab).

We also work (-ed) with OEM partners and software distributors. Over the years, we have done plenty of that too.

Our first product released under the Mediachance “imprint” (which is a slightly fancier way of pretending this was all more organized than it really was), was Multimedia Builder (MMB) in 1998 (yes, the last century) That was the beginning of what, in hindsight, turned into a rather long habit. Since then, we have created more than 50 different applications and sold them in markets around the world. Which is a polite way of saying we just kept making software instead of getting a normal job.

Our Customers While we mostly sell to regular end users, the strange side effect of making a lot of software over a lot of years is that businesses use it too. That ranges from small companies all the way up to large enterprises, universities, and suspicious government research facilities. So yes, despite the lack of glass meeting rooms, mission statements, and well dressed people saying “leverage our synergies,” some fairly large organizations use Mediachance software. Some of our bigger customers include, in no particular order, (although we put NASA first):

NASA NASA Ames Research Center ABC Australian Broadcasting BBC and BBC Post Production HBO CNN BMW Group LucasArts IBM Fuji Film Microsoft NIKE Electronic Arts Seagate Technology Technicolor SONY Computer Entertainment The Museum of Modern Art NY UBISOFT Coca Cola FedEx RICOH SWITZERLAND Siemens XEROX Corel Corporation Adobe Systems Carl Zeiss D-LINK Corporation MOTOROLA INC Logitech

OEM, bundles and distributions

PEUGEOT CITROEN Eastman Kodak Company Boeing Australia Limited NIKON Mastercard Canon USA Inc Microsoft Research Ltd NEC Delta Airlines Citibank Reuters Lockheed Martin Halliburton Intel Pfizer Inc Goodyear Dunlop UK Ltd EBAY INTERNATIONAL AG McGraw-Hill Symantec Panasonic Corporation Nokia Sun Microsystems University of Essex Oxford University Procter & Gamble Nordstrom Inc Pepsico Qualcomm Radio-Canada

What is this “Cranky Man” stuff? Mediachance has been around for almost 30 years, and yes, that means the founder has earned the right to be a little cranky. After decades of doing everything himself, he has stopped pretending this is some grand corporate machine. It never was. Mediachance has always been a small, stubborn, one-person(-ish) operation. (Around 2000-2005 we had a few external programmers) The upside of that is simple: nobody here, in the Cranky bunker makes software because a committee approved a market opportunity. Mediachance has always made products out of genuine personal interest. We started building DVD authoring software back in 2001 because the founder, (not as cranky at that time) wanted to make DVDs for his parents and the proper tools like Scenarist were absurdly expensive. That spirit still drives everything now. The current business model, if you want to call it that, is mostly this: make things that the author wants to use himself, and put your whole heart into them.

There is a certain irony in having Adobe and Corel on that list. Still, Cranky Man visited Corel headquarters on several occasions, and they were perfectly polite and generous with the free drinks. There may also have been a sandwich or a pizza involved, but memory is no longer prepared to testify under oath.

Dynamic Auto Painter is our longest-running and most extensively updated software. It began in 2008 as a simple algorithm, which, a few million lines of code later, no longer qualifies as simple (or algorithm) by any known definition. It repaints your images in the style of the old masters, or at least gives it a very serious go. When everything lines up just right, the results can be spectacular.

It is difficult to point to one single “most complex” application, because given enough years, most software acquires its own special form of insanity. Still, Cranky Man remembers Novel Forge, formerly CQuill, as one of the more elaborate offenders, a thing he was both deeply proud of and mildly crushed that almost nobody else cared about. For no especially good reason, he kept inventing things nobody had explicitly asked for: a thematic thesaurus, a modern-to-historic synonym lookup, and a ridiculously fast search engine that could surface related sentences from books as soon as you typed a word. Then he decided that was still not enough, and added an image wall with simulated hanging strings like in detective films, a spreadsheet clone for reasons best left unexamined, and eventually an entire chatbot system. Some people call this feature development. Others might call it a failure to pause and touch grass now and then. Some may prefer the simpler term: insanity.

Music is one of Cranky Man’s enduring passions, somewhere alongside art and writing silly things. He plays loudly and at length, often to the visible distress of other members of his own family, which hardly seems fair. So the next logical venture was music software. The first green shoots of that particular obsession include EP Sample Editor and LOTM, Lord of the Mastering, the audio mastering software he always wanted and eventually had to make himself because nobody else had bothered to do it properly.

“Oh, I am THAT cranky old software designer; raving like a lunatic about the current state of the world and complaining about how nothing is how it used to be.”