Nero Announces Design Win With VIA Technologies, Inc.; Nero Digital IP Core to Provide Future VIA Products with AVC/H.264 High Profile Solution for SD and HD Video Decoding

--Nero, leaders in digital media technology, announces today that the company is licensing its Nero Digital IP core to VIA Technologies, Inc., leading suppliers of system components for the PC and embedded markets. The perfect solution for ASICs and SoCs, the Nero Digital decoding core solution is hardware-based and capable of full ISO/IEC 14496-10 Advanced Video Coding Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10) compliance decoding up to a resolution of 4096 x 4096.

"As a pioneer in integrating hardware video decoding for the PC, this agreement is an important step in continuing our support for the latest high definition multimedia content," said Tzumu Lin, Senior Vice President, VIA Technologies, Inc. "In the search to find a solution that met our needs for integration into a wide range of solutions, the Nero AVC/H.264 core solution came out as the clear winner enabling exceptional performance over a wide range of video formats."

"While we view this agreement with VIA to be a major business victory, it also further validates the strength of our digital media tools and the progress we continue to make in the audio/video, computer and communications industries," said Richard Lesser, CEO of Nero. "With our high end Nero Digital IP Core, we have an unmatched AVC/H.264 video decoding solution."

The Nero Digital decoder core has very low hardware requirements and supports Baseline, Main, Extended and High Profiles. It synthesizes with major digital cell libraries, and can decode SD content with as low as 40MHz frequency, and HD 1080p and 1080i with 200MHz. It is optimized for low internal SRAM usage and provides pixel-perfect output with AVC/H.264 compliance streams and "real world" streams of different encoders on the market.

The Nero Digital AVC/H.264 decoder IP core accesses DDR or SDRAM memory over a 64-bit shared bus, making it simple to integrate with existing SoC designs. The IP core streams in source video via serial, PCI, or Ethernet, and other interface types can be implemented in a custom silicon solution along with various controller options.

About Nero

Nero (www.nero.com) develops and distributes the world's leading digital media solutions for consumers and professionals. Today more than 200 million users worldwide rely on Nero's award-winning and trusted, industry approved applications to manage the needs of the connected digital home and forward-thinking corporations.

Nero's rapidly-growing portfolio of products defines new levels of innovation in the company's three key areas of focus: Digital Media Solutions - delivering multimedia applications for audio, video, photo and TV capturing, editing, burning, managing and sharing; Audio and Video Compression Technologies - providing world-class interoperable standards-based solutions for encoding and decoding digital content with support for Next Generation HD and popular handheld formats; and VoIP Solutions - providing cost-effective voice, text and video communication over the Internet for home and business.

Nero products are globally distributed by leading hardware manufacturers, international distribution partners and online portals, and can be purchased directly at www.nero.com. Nero provides worldwide coverage through Nero AG, based in Karlsbad, Germany and two subsidiaries: Nero Inc. in Glendale, California, USA and Nero K.K. in Yokohama, Japan.

About VIA Technologies, Inc.

VIA Technologies, Inc. (TSE 2388) is the foremost fabless supplier of market-leading core logic chipsets, low power x86 processors, advanced connectivity, multimedia, networking and storage silicon, and complete platform solutions that are driving system innovation in the PC and embedded markets. Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, VIA's global network links the high tech centers of the US, Europe and Asia, and its customer base includes the world's top OEMs, motherboard vendors and system integrators. www.via.com.tw