Press

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading provider of products and services for the Macintosh marketplace, today announced that in response to a request from Apple Computer (Nasdaq: APPL), OWC will no longer market its DVD Enabler software effective immediately.

DVD Enabler was a software tool introduced by OWC in late July that the firm was bundling with its new external FireWire DVD- R/RW hard drives. With DVD Enabler, OWC customers were able to utilize Apple’s own software program (iDVD v2.1) to author DVDs on OWC’s Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire solutions. With today’s announcement, OWC is also dropping all support of Apple’s iDVD software.

“Although we had received strong support from our customers for the DVD Enabler software and our iDVD support, we value our long-standing relationship with Apple Computer,” said Larry O’Connor, president of OWC. “We have, therefore, agreed to honor Apple’s request and have halted all sales and marketing of DVD Enabler and all support of Apple’s iDVD.”

Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW FireWire solutions were introduced by OWC in late July to allow users to author and burn DVDs using many DVD/CD authoring software applications, including Apple Studio Pro, iTunes, Roxio Toast, and CharisMac Discribe, among others.

“These drives are being used by a variety of individuals and businesses,” O’Connor said. “We find that they are being used to store family movies and photo journals that can be played back for ages to come, as well as to store backup files and multimedia presentations that can be played on most standard DVD and CD players. Our Mercury Pro FireWire solutions cover them all, and we make it even easier by including support for standard Apple authoring software. The high capacity and low cost of DVD and CD media along with the plug-and-play ease of FireWire make our Mercury solutions an attractive choice for businesses and home users working with large, important files.”

The Mercury Pro plug-and-play drives are compatible with both Macintosh and Windows-based systems, and feature a Pioneer DVR-104 drive mechanism, built-in headphone jack, and power eject. Each drive comes with five pieces of DVD-R 2x media, 25 pieces of CD-R media, one piece of CD-RW media, and all connecting cables.

The Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire solutions write to industry standard 4.7GB DVD-R discs at up to 2x speeds and 4.7GB DVD-RW discs at 1x. The comparable Mercury Pro CD-R/RW FireWire solutions write to 700MB CD-R discs at up to 8x speeds and to 700MB CD-RW discs at up to 4x speeds. Both the DVD and CD solutions give users the ability to manage large back-up jobs, archive data, or create, edit and rewrite to the discs many times over.

Pricing for the Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW and the Mercury Pro CD-R/RW FireWire external hard drives start at $399.95. FireWire/USB 2.0 versions are also available at prices starting at $429.95. These drives are available exclusively through OWC at www.macsales.com.