Taipei (Taiwan) – Did you know that Corel now owns WinDVD?  We sure didn’t and we thank Corel’s 5-foot tall, squeaky chipmunk voiced, oh so cute as a button ambassador for leading us to the company’s suite to enlighten our minds.  Actually, we were just randomly jumping from floor to floor checking out the most interesting rooms the Grand Hyatt during the Computex tradeshow in Taipei.  We exited at the 11th floor and there she was holding a sign that was probably bigger than she was.  “Welcome to Corel, please visit our suite,” she squeaked, mustering her best Chinese-accented English.  How could we resist?

The booth was jam packed with other Computex attendees, news reporters and even a broadcast video team - this girl was definitely doing a great job in luring people in.  WinDVD and LinDVD (the Linux version of the software) posters adorned the suite and that was the shocker – when the heck did that happen?  Did we completely miss a huge tech acquisition?  Company reps said we weren't the only ones and most people don’t know about Corel owning WinDVD, the famous DVD playing software originally developed by InterVideo.

Ok, so there were Windows computers playing the latest Blu-Ray and DVD discs.  CPU utilization was fairly low and the player looked great.  But perhaps much more interesting was an Asus 700 series EeePC that was playing a DVD with LinDVD.  Sure, it was running the disc off an external USB DVD player, but this was quite impressive.  Company reps said the program is quite lightweight and the 900 MHz machine (it’s actually underclocked to 600 MHz when you buy it) can easily handle decoding of the movie.

See we never would have known all this if it weren’t for Corel’s very helpful ambassador!

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