NEC Europe Chooses Sonic MyDVD® and CinePlayer™ for DVD-recordable Drives

NEC’s ND-1100 and ND-1300 DVD Recordable Drives Powered by Industry’s Most Popular DVD Software

Marin County, California (May 22, 2003) – Sonic Solutions® (NASDAQ: SNIC) announced today that NEC Europe, one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions, has selected Sonic MyDVD® 4 and Sonic CinePlayer™ 1.5 as the DVD creation and PC playback software to power their ND family of DVD recordable drive products. With MyDVD and CinePlayer, NEC MultiSpin DVD Writer ND-1100 and ND-1300 users are able to quickly and easily create and watch DVDs of their favorite home videos and photos with Hollywood-style motion menus, animated buttons, and high-quality DVD slideshows. And with OpenDVD® technology, the DVD projects they create can be re-edited later at any time to add and delete content and change menus.

NEC’s MultiSpin DVD Writer ND-1100 is a quadruple-speed DVD-recordable drive supporting the DVD+R(W) format, and the new ND-1300 DVD-recordable drive is a quadruple-speed multi-format writer that supports both DVD+R(W) and DVD-R(W), and gives users the freedom to choose which rewritable DVD format they want to use to create home movies, to record music or to store images and data. By using Sonic MyDVD, NEC MultiSpin DVD Writer users are able to quickly create, archive and share home movies on DVD. With Sonic CinePlayer, users of the high-performance DVD R drives are assured the highest-quality PC playback of their DVD and Video CD titles.

“NEC Europe is dedicated to providing consumers with the best solutions for creating and watching DVDs,” said Ralf Dajek, Product Manager, Peripherals at NEC Europe. “We chose Sonic, a company that has long been at the forefront of DVD technology, and their MyDVD and CinePlayer applications, because they deliver the easiest and most creative way for home users to cherish their precious memories on DVD”.

“NEC Europe is a major player in the consumer electronics arena, and we are very pleased to have been selected as the ideal DVD solution for their MultiSpin DVD Writer series drives,” said John Newman, Director of European Operations at Sonic. “Sonic MyDVD and CinePlayer are the perfect combination for the ND-1100 as well as for the ND-1300, allowing home users to easily create their own personal blockbusters and then watch them right on their PC with the highest video quality available.”

The NEC MultiSpin DVD Writers are available now at retail outlets across Europe at the suggested retail prices of 349.- Euro for the ND-1300 and 269.- Euro for the ND-1100.

About the NEC MultiSpin DVD Writer ND-1100 and ND-1300
The NEC MultiSpin DVD Writer provides a complete solution for data backup, storage and distribution - from sharing films and music to archiving a massive 4,7 GB/side of content on one DVD disc alone. The ND-1100 is a fast recording solution and is perfect for users who want to write to the DVD+R(W) format. The ND-1300 is NEC's 4x combination format DVD writer which supports both DVD+R(W) and DVD-R(W), eliminating the compatibility issues that have slowed the take up of DVD writers. The ND-1300 removes the guesswork once and for all, enabling end-users to create disks for play-back in virtually all DVD video players and DVD-ROM drives with no compromise in performance. The ND-1300 as well as the ND-1100 delivers very fast and reliable performance at both reading and writing media. Its performance enables the recording of one hour of DVD Video in just 15 minutes. The NEC MultiSpin DVD Writer also includes ACTOPC – NEC´s high-resolution writing strategy to enhance the accuracy of written data. ACTOPC provides the user with improved quality of data copying – while allowing for local anomaly in media-manufacturing tolerances, finger marks, etc.

About Sonic MyDVD
Sonic MyDVD is the leading PC application for consumer DVD creation. With its ability to record analog and digital video (DV) in real-time into MPEG-2 for DVD, MyDVD is the fastest and easiest way to share treasured video memories with friends and family on DVD discs, from wedding videos to children's birthday parties and other special events.

Sonic MyDVD makes it easy to burn high-quality DVDs with motion-video menus, animated buttons and DVD slideshows with transitions and soundtracks. Sonic MyDVD also features optimized Direct-to-DVD™ recording which allows users, in just a few clicks, to record their content directly to DVD from a video source connected to the computer’s video input. Sonic MyDVD is also OpenDVD^®-compliant, enabling previously burned DVDs to be opened, re-edited, updated with new video and photo content and re-burned to DVD and CD recordable/re-writable media. This enables an entirely new generation of DVD and CD applications, such as video diaries, up-to-the-minute, customized sales presentations, compilations of family events, and more. About Sonic CinePlayer With its high-performance MPEG decoding engine and native support for Microsoft DirectX®, Sonic CinePlayer provides the highest-quality DVD and Video CD playback experience available on the PC. Sonic CinePlayer is also the first software DVD player to take advantage of OpenDVD. With its ability to launch an OpenDVD project directly from the player into an authoring application for further editing, Sonic CinePlayer takes a bold step in the direction of giving users a seamless experience in both creating and playing DVD content.

About Sonic Solutions (NASDAQ: SNIC)
Based in Marin County, California, Sonic Solutions (http://www.sonic.com) is the world's leading supplier of DVD creation software for professional, industrial and consumer applications. The majority of major film releases on DVD have been produced on Sonic's professional DVD authoring systems in studios around the world. Sonic's MyDVD® and DVDit!® are the most widely used DVD creation applications by consumers and video enthusiasts and are the solutions of choice among the key PC and after-market drive suppliers. Sonic's RecordNow™ is a leading solution for audio and data mastering. Sonic's AuthorScript®, the DVD and CD formatting and burning engine that underlies Sonic's applications, is the most widely deployed DVD software engine and has been licensed by Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, and many others.

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) (FTSE: 6701q.1) is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. Ranked as one of the world's top patent-producing companies, NEC delivers integrated solutions in the key fields of computer and networking through its market-focused, in-house companies: NEC Solutions and NEC Networks. NEC Corporation and its subsidiaries employ more than 140,000 people worldwide and had net sales of approximately $39 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2002. For additional information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec.com.

Sonic, the Sonic logo, Backup MyPC, CinePlayer, DVD PrePlay, DVD Producer, Edit-on-DVD, OpenDVD, PrimeTime, RecordNow and Simple Backup are trademarks of Sonic Solutions. AuthorScript, AutoDVD, DVD-Audio Creator, DVD Creator, DVDit!, DVD Fusion, MyDVD, NoNOISE, ReelDVD, Scenarist and Sonic Solutions are registered trademarks of Sonic Solutions. All other company or product names are trademarks of their respective owners and, in some cases, are used by Sonic under license. Specifications, pricing and delivery schedules are subject to change without notice.