Tarari Ships First Integrated Accelerator for Encoding High-Quality Windows Media; Five OEMs Adopt Joint Tarari, Microsoft Solution to Help Producers Dramatically Accelerate Delivery of High-Quality Digital Content to Market.

SAN DIEGO -- Tarari, Inc., the award-winning acceleration company, announced today the immediate availability of the Tarari(R) Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media(R), the first integrated solution enabling producers and distributors of standard- and high-definition digital content to dramatically accelerate the encoding process without any loss of quality. The result of a joint effort between Tarari and Microsoft, the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media can be easily added to existing production systems, enabling OEMs to include encoding acceleration in their solutions without any re-architecting or reconfiguration. Five OEM customers -- 1 Beyond, Boxx Technologies, Digital Rapids, Root 6 and Zetools -- have already signed up to include the new Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media in solutions supplied to major movie studios, post production houses, and the IPTV industry. These "Powered by Tarari" products will be revealed for the first time at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB2005) in Las Vegas, April 18-21, 2005.

Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Video (WMV) and the anticipated SMPTE VC-1 encoding standard are helping to make high-quality digital video ubiquitous, with HD plasma screens, VOD & IPTV solutions, PDA phones, PCs, and more than 500 consumer devices all targets for video content. The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media is the industry's only encoding solution that offers the performance benefit of hardware acceleration without any compromise in the quality of encoded content, and without requiring producers or artists to change their applications, existing hardware, production processes, or configurations.

"The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media enables producers and distributors of digital content to create their products faster without making any changes at all to their current processes," said Jim Wilson, CTO Microsoft Technologies at Tarari, Inc. "They simply install the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media in an existing workstation or server and the encoding process is automatically and immediately up to 10 times faster. This means dramatically reduced production times and costs, lower TCO, and the opportunity to create new products and revenue streams."

The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media, a PCI-bus card that consumes less than 25 watts of power, installs in any Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based workstation or server. The card provides seamless acceleration for applications based on the Microsoft Windows Media Format SDK. Tarari and its partners have already successfully demonstrated accelerating a number of applications including: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Anystream Agility, Canopus ProCoder 2.0, Digital Rapids Stream Encoder, Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series Encoder, Root 6 ContentAgent, and Telestream Flip Factory.

"The Tarari architecture is very nicely integrated with Microsoft's Windows media SDK. We wrote the code for our system, put Tarari inside the box and it was immediately accelerated. There was no work to do. It was very, very easy," said James Clarke, Chief Technology Officer of Root 6 Technology Ltd.

Under development for more than a year, the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media leverages Tarari's award-winning acceleration technology to offload and accelerate the most processor-intensive algorithms in the Windows Media encoding application, such as motion estimation. The board provides improved encoding efficiency when encoding multiple video streams using a single Tarari Encoder Accelerator board. Multiple boards can also be used in the same server to further increase encoding speed and efficiency. The result is that film and TV post-production facilities, broadcasters, and IPTV providers can encode their highest definition products much faster and without quality loss. The acceleration technology supports HDTV content as well as 2K and 4K digital cinema formats, and prepares producers for the next generation of DVD content based on the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

"The Tarari Encoding Accelerator for Windows Media provides an excellent first step on the path of not only encoding content dramatically faster, but to also significantly enhancing the security of the industry's valuable media assets through Digital Rights Management," said Randy Smerik, CEO of Tarari, Inc.

The Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media is also the only encoding solution utilizing reprogrammable logic. As the Windows Media application evolves, Tarari can update the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media with a simple upgrade. Tarari can also improve performance and add features to existing deployments via a software upgrade. By the second-half of 2005, for example, the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media will enable the encoding of high definition 720P and 1080P content at one-to-one real-time rates.

About Tarari, Inc.

Tarari, Inc., the award-winning acceleration company headquartered in San Diego, Calif., USA, designs and produces Tarari Content Processors that accelerate and offload compute-intensive, complex algorithms used in XML/Web Services, Network Security and Digital Media environments. Tarari's product line includes both board and ASIC-based Content Processors. Tarari's customers include network equipment, appliance and server vendors as well as independent software vendors. Tarari is a privately held company with venture backing from Crosspoint Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Miramar Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley Venture Partners and XMLFund. For more information, visit: www.tarari.com e-mail: [e-mail] or call 858-385-5131.

Trademarked company and product names are the property of their respective owners.