March 3
Sonic Solutions Streams DVD over the Web
Streaming DVD offers video, interactivity

by David Nagel
Senior producer

Sonic Solutions will upgrade its DVD authoring tools to support its new Streaming DVD technology, which allows users to create content geared toward Web distribution using the DVD-Video format.

The company explained in a written statement: "With Streaming DVD, the high-quality MPEG-2 video used in Hollywood-style DVD-Video releases is supplemented with video in low bit-rate formats designed for Internet applications. By using the same navigation as DVD-Video, Streaming DVD retains the interactive menus and multi-language capabilities of the consumer DVD format but adds the ability to publish and immediately access video content over the Internet."

The technology includes three components: authoring, broadcasting and playback. The authoring component will be available in all Sonic authoring solutions, including DVD Creator and DVD Fusion, both of which are available for the Macintosh. It will also work with DVDit!, a Windows-based authoring tool. Content can be authored to a hard disk, DVD or cDVD, a standard that allows authors to place DVD content on CD-RW discs.

Streaming DVD discs will play on standard set-top and Mac- and PC-based players. For broadcast, Streaming DVD productions can be streamed from standard Internet file servers, without the need for specialized video servers at the ISP.

Playback of streaming content with standard DVD navigation controls requires Streaming DVD-enabled devices, which will then play the titles as if they were regualr DVDs.

Sonic says its applications will be updated to support Streaming DVD by June.

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