Mark Cohen passed noted some caveats in Apple's new DVD Studio Pro, which is repackaged, renamed, and re-arranged version of Astarte's DVD Director suite and noted the availability of a discount coupon for previous owners of the Astarte product:

"Apple DVD Studio Pro is fully functional only on Power Macintosh G4 computers. It also requires Apple DVD Player 2.0 or higher. DVD Studio Pro is not supported on other Macintosh configurations. DVD Studio Pro does not support previewing with the WiredStream card (also called the Wired4DVD card) that came with Astarte DVDirector. You can still use the WiredStream card for playing finished projects from the hard disk, but the preview function is now handled by the Apple DVD player software."

This is dissapointing as the Wire4DVD card allowed for vastly superior (hardware based) playback in comparison to Apple's DVD player (software), and also provided the ability to play MPEG1 and MPEG2 files directly off the drive ! This is an immensely useful feature as the need to preview encoded files during the authoring process is essential !

by MacNN Staff