At this week’s International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam, Sonic Solutions (Nasdaq: SNIC) announced DVD Creator Version 2.1.1, the latest release of the professional DVD production system. Among the many enhancements included in this release are Sonic’s powerful eDVD(TM) Web-integration capability, new WriteDirect(TM) functionality to boost productivity, and enhancements to Sonic’s award-winning video encoding.

DVD Creator 2.1.1 makes it possible to create DVD-Video titles that provide access to Internet URLs. When viewing DVD titles on Internet-connected PCs or compatible DVD set-top players, users can directly access Web pages from DVD menu buttons and from within video segments. Sonic’s eDVD technology features InterActual Technologies’ new 2.0 playback engine. Because this is tightly integrated with the vast majority of DVD software players, eDVD supports web-connected playback on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. It also avoids the feature and compatibility problems involved with other approaches that require a special DVD player to be distributed on the DVD-Video disc — for example, some approaches make it impossible to use standard DVD surround audio on the web-connected title.

‘eDVD brings us an unbelievable opportunity. We can enhance our entertainment titles, and give our corporate customers a powerful new capability combining DVD quality with up-to-date Web information,’ says Dave Pollard, partner of Squash, a Soho-based future media company. ‘Sonic and InterActual are an unbeatable combination — they are both leaders in their respective fields, and the technology is identical to what is used by the Internet-enabled Hollywood titles.’

DVD Creator also includes new WriteDirect functionality, which streamlines the process of outputting to DVD-R, DLT drives, or DVD disc images. ‘We’ve eliminated the intermediate disk-write steps within this process, which saves time and makes the overall formatting process far more efficient,’ said Giles Baker, DVD creator product manager at Sonic Solutions.