From: "Glenn Meadows" 

Sonic Solutions is the leader in DVD authoring software/hardware with
products from the bundled DVD-IT that comes with DVD burners, all the way
to the 6 digit (price wise) Sonic Creator systems that run on Macs.  They
also bought out their competitors who made Scenarist, which was the main
high end PC authoring platform.. They develop for both platforms now, and
close on to 90%+ of all DVD's (commercial released) are authored on Sonic
designed/built systems.  They build/design their own hardware MPEG
compression hardware, that does multi-pass preview runs to optimize the
encoding for minimal artifacts and such, and maximum usage of the disk
space.

Sonic Solutions started out as one of the first really successful AUDIO
editing systems.  They kind of lost their way on the audio side, and were
"seduced" by the video "dark side", and subsequently
sold their entire audio development division to a privately held firm Sonic
Studio LLC, who took over support and development of their virtually
abandoned audio clients.  I think many were considering a real class action
lawsuit at the time.  SS sold people a new system (hardware) that hey had
to pay for, and the software was an early alpha version, that took almost
2.5 years to reach a useable state as a late beta, and they prior to that,
stopped any further development/bug fix on their old hardware/software,
leaving hundreds of users hanging in the breeze.  Sonic Studio completed
the initial development, brought the product to a solid useable point, all
for no $$$ from those who paid Sonic Solutions for the hardware software. 
Sonic Solutions was once the premier Audio editing platform in the music
industry, but over that 2-4 year period, got left in the dust by the PC
software.


--
Glenn M.


"Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
news:415833b4$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
> "Dave"  wrote in message
> news:l2dgl09ragbj5ouvoqr9mujj77rbos6s8s{at}4ax.com...
> > On 27 Sep 2004 02:38:46 GMT, Ellen K
 wrote in
> > message :
> >
> > | Nicotine film?   You smoke?   I never knew that.
> >
> > Don't be silly.  I work in a bar.
> >
> > | One of the burn-it outfits (Roxio?) just got out of the business and
> > into
> > | something else, I forget what.
> >
> > It would surprise me if it were Roxio, they are still the industry
> > leaders.
> >
>
> Roxio is selling it's software unit
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/10/roxio_turns_into_napster/
> Apparently tricked by its own hype, Roxio has decided to sell off its
> consumer software business and focus instead on the dubious online music
> market. The company will go so far as to give up the Roxio name, taking on
> the Napster name of its music division.
>
> Sonic Solutions has agreed to pay $80m for Roxio's CD and DVD recording,
> authoring, photo and video editing applications. Roxio will receive $70m
in
> cash and $10m worth of Sonic's stock. Roxio will also change its company
> name to Napster and looks to trade under the symbol NAPS on the NASDAQ
> exchange
>
>

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