Western Digital Cooler-Running Hard Drives | Video Toolbox 2.0

Western Digital Announces Cooler-Running Hard Drives

Western Digital has announced that it has made cooling enhancements on its Caviar family of hard drives, a group of 7,200 rpm drives available with EIDE or Serial ATA interfaces. As an added benefit, this process reduces power consumption and increases reliability as well. WD has also reduced seek noise in the new drives, with a new set of seek algorithms in the drive's firmware.

Acquisition Corner

Leitch has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Inscriber, developer of titlinsoftware for HD and SD television graphics for broadcast and post-production applications. The announced purchase price is $18 million (Canadian). Leitch carries a complimentary range of products, focusing most closely on broadcast graphics.

Sonic Solutions has announced that it has consummated its acquisition of Roxio. The Napster division of Roxio has changed its name to Napster; Inc. Sonic has absorbed some 200 Roxio employees. Sonic plans to keep the Roxio name for consumer products, including Easy Media Creator, but plans for a more in-depth product branding strategy will be announced later this year.

Teac Announces New CD Duplicators Teac has announced a line of CD duplicators, including 1x1, 1x3 and 1x7 models, all of which operate at 52X. 80GB hard drives will also be offered for the 1x3 and 1x7 models.

Teac will also launch a line of DVD-R duplicators during the 2nd quarter of 2005, to join its P55 photo-quality dye-sublimation disc printer in its lineup.

Ulead Announces Video Toolbox 2.0 Transcoding Software

Ulead has announced Video Toolbox 2.0, a software package that offers basic video trimming and conversion among several major file formats, including AVI, MPEG-1, MEPG-2, MP3, WMV, ASF, MPEG-4, and 3GPP to allow converted content to be viewed on the Web, home entertainment devices and wireless phones, among other places. The $60 product ($50 for the version without 3GPP wireless phone support) is available for electronic distribution at Ulead's Web site, www.ulead.com.