Spruce Technologies, Inc. , today announced SpruceUp(TM) , the first full-featured, personal DVD authoring software priced at just $129.

SpruceUp contains a single, integrated authoring environment with context-sensitive Help Buttons for easy mastery of the three steps to author, simulate, and export their own DVD titles. Projects can incorporate thousands of menus with the freedom to link to and from any movie or menu. It includes everything needed to play back as well as author titles on the same disc.

SpruceUp projects can include Spruce’s redistributable player and a 2x-trial version of itself on the user’s finished disc. Users can share SpruceUp authored DVD content with others, regardless of whether they have DVD playback capability. Friends or colleagues can load the content, create their own title, and go to the Spruce website for a web key to activate their own full-use version of SpruceUp.

The software comes with designer templates, a tutorial and tips, and operates on all Microsoft Windows 98, NT4, 2000 or Millenium Edition PCs configured for advanced multimedia content creation. It can be used with most industry-standard CD-Recordable (CD-R), CD-Rewriteable (CD-RW), DVD-Recordable (DVD-R) and DVD-Rewriteable (DVD-RW) disc drives; video capture devices, utilities and editors with DVD-compliant MPEG output.

SpruceUp is currently in use at Spruce customer beta sites. The company expects to release it in Q4 2000 through OEM partners, and as a downloadable product purchased directly through the Spruce e-commerce Website.