Keyboard Learns, Self-Adjusts to Your Typing Style

We all know about the need to take breaks stave off muscle fatigue, but let's face it: Hours can pass while we stay in the same keyboard, pounding on our keyboards. Smartfish Technologies is bringing a new, smarter keyboard to market in March. The wired keyboard, expected to sell for $150, automatically adjusts itself over the course of a day.

For every hour of work, the keyboard makes some movement; it adjusts side to side within a space of about 1.5 inches. It also flexes and extends up and down to help promote blood flow. After about 20,000 keystrokes, the keyboard will move more frequently to help further mix things up. The keys vary in size, because of the curve in the keyboard, and to promote variation among your typing movements.

As a touch typist, I found the protoype keyboard felt comfortable, and the key positions convenient. I look forward to trying the real thing when its ready to ship later this year. The company also expects to offer a mouse, too, based on similar design principles.

Blu-ray: Strong Start for 2009

Blu-ray has had a tumultuous past, but after its showing at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show that ended yesterday, the technology shows great promise.
Disc sales have tripled in the past year, according to The Digital Entertainment Group, an organization made up of movie studios and electronics manufacturers who track the industry. Blu-ray sold 28.6 million discs in the fourth quarter of 2008, and there are 10.7 million Blu-ray players currently in the United States.
The biggest seller was The Dark Knight, the number two highest grossing motion picture of all time. The Dark Knight is the first Blu-ray disc to sell over one million copies.
These strong sales were also reported by the British Video Association in a post-Christmas report.
With the bounty of new Blu-ray devices splashing into the market, 2009 looks to be a great year for the format, and may catapult it out of relative obscurity and into the mass market.
LG announced the LG BD370 and LG BD390 Network Blu-ray Disc Players, which feature on-demand streaming content from Netflix, CinemaNow, and YouTube. Samsung released a sexy new model, The Samsung BD-P3600, also featuring streaming content and 1GB of internal flash memory, and a hyper-connected Blu-ray home theater set-up. Panasonic produced the portable Blu-ray player, and Sharp built Blu-ray into its new LCD TVs.
Meanwhile, prices on connected Blu-ray players have dropped, which should pique consumer's interest in the format.
After a dubious year of sales and recognition, Blu-ray seems to have finally hit its stride. You can expect 2009 to be a stellar year for disc releases, sales, and new products supporting the winner of the high-def war. And remember: the more popular a product becomes, the more likely prices will drop even further.

CBS Plans to Expand TV.com

Today, CBS is expected to announce content deals with MGM, PBS, Showtime, Sony, and Endemol USA (producers of shows such as "Deal or No Deal" and "Fear Factor") to add popular shows to its online video streaming site TV.com.

Several weeks ago, CBS started featuring its own content on the site, and has had a content deal to access the Hulu library for several months. This is all part of an ongoing revamp for TV.com since CBS acquired the domain as part of its purchase of CNET last year. For several years, CBS has tried to stay relevant with online video streaming through content deals with third-party providers such as AOL and Beebo. However, the success of Hulu--a joint venture NBC and Fox--seems to have prompted CBS to step up its game.

What CBS hopes will really catch on at TV.com are the social media features that other sites, including Hulu and Joost, have also tried to implement to varying degrees. On TV.com, users can participate in forums, comment, rate, and review episodes; tag preferred programming; create a favorites list; contribute to episode guides and other content on the site; and start a blog. Hulu, by comparison contains fewer than half of these features.
CBS chief Les Moonves calls TV.com "extremely exciting" and believes it will become "one of the leading destinations" for video streaming, according to The New York Times. But why he thinks social media, and a lineup that you can find almost anywhere else--save, of course, for CBS's own shows--is such a winning combination is anybody's guess.
How many people are really interested in getting yet another social media profile just to comment on a TV show and create episode guides? As I've said before, the world is awash in an endless array of social media sites. The problem is this forces users to have too many separate identities across a wide range of sites with nothing to bring it all together.

Some services, such as Facebook Connect and OpenID, are working to consolidate things; however, the concept has yet to catch on. It seems to me that what people really want out of online video streaming is a fast, easily navigable site with a rich library to choose from. Social media features might be nice, but just because you can add them doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Adobe Systems Premiere Elements 7

The newest version of Elements is Webbier than ever--with online backup and syncing, Internet-refreshed tutorials, and downloadable content--but to get a usable amount of storage space, you'll have to pay $50 a year.

Who needs a big hard drive when everyone's videos will eventually live online? Neat new Web services, such as the ones offered by Adobe and linked to from its new Premiere Elements 7 video editor, may incline folks to load everything they have onto the Web. But Adobe will have to offer more space for less money--and greatly improve the editor's integration with online services--to attract heavy video users.

You don't have to buy the $100 Premiere Elements desktop application to get a free Photoshop.com account, which includes 2GB of capacity and a personal URL such as yourname.photoshop.com. (The site isn't identified as "Premiere.com," because it also works with Adobe's Photoshop Elements image editor.) The 2GB of storage can accommodate a large number of still photos, but it equals less than half an hour of mini-DV video, for example. An upgrade to 20GB costs $50 per year; and additional storage packs are available in sizes up to 500GB, though Adobe hasn't finalized their pricing. By comparison, a subscription fee of $50 per year at IDrive.com will get you 150GB of storage space.

Unlike IDrive.com, however, Photoshop.com offers more than just a place to park data. You can set up Premiere Elements 7 to back up files automatically; you can set preference parameters (for example, you can instruct the site not to back up any file larger than X MB); and once files are uploaded, you can access them from any computer that has an Internet connection, of course. But you can view only pictures online--to watch videos, you must download the entire clip to your desktop and use the PC's video playback software. The interface at Photoshop.com is attractive and operates slickly; and it has conduits to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, so you can view images hosted on those services in the same Photoshop.com window (it's pretty slow when accessing outside images, though).

I found that specifying files for backup within Elements itself required more steps than I'd like; you have to open a "Tagging" dialog box and drag a tag onto the files. It would have been more convenient if the program had allowed me to right-clicking on files in the organizer and then choose an 'upload' option.

And that's just one of the frustrations I had with Elements' interface. Many commands are arranged in a seemingly haphazard way. For example, you can use a system-tray icon to set backup options such as instructing the application to upload only while idle; but to see which files have been backed up or have a backup pending, you click on a tiny icon in the lower left corner of the application window--and this action prompts them to appear in the Organize window in the upper right corner of the application. To set additional backup options, you must pull up the Preferences dialog box from beneath the Edit menu.

Another drawback: Elements 7 has no link in the main application window to take you to your uploaded files (unless you count the splash screen when it starts up; but if you want to get back to that, you have to close your project). The program's text and icons were very small on the high-resolution, 17-inch laptop monitor I was using, and you can't adjust their size. Last year in my review of Elements 4 (the immediate predecessor of Elements 7, oddly enough), I complained about too-small text size; the problem seems worse in Elements 7, probably because the latest program requires you to do more hunting for important commands.

Your Video Stinks!

The Premiere Elements application does have several new features that don't depend on online interaction. One is the Smart Tag feature, which analyzes your clips to identify ones that may be too dark, blurry, shaky, or out-of-focus--and that includes faces. I agreed with its evaluations (even when it called one of my videos "low quality"), and it works quickly. By default, Premiere Elements' and Photoshop Elements' organizers share the same catalog file, and tags (other than Smart Tags)created in one application show up in both.

Another new feature, Instant Movie, lets you quickly create a movie by selecting clips, choosing a theme, and letting the application implement transitions and effects based on that theme. (Other video-editing applications, such as Pinnacle Studio and Corel VideoStudio, have such automated tools.) With my clips, Elements' tool worked about as well as its competitors--which is to say, not very well. I had trouble finding a theme suitable for my clips; the cuts from one shot to another seemed strange, and the transitions were often inappropriate.

You can edit your movie after applying an Instant Movie theme, but be warned: It broke my 5-minute movie into hundreds of tiny pieces of video, audio, transitions, and effects, making editing the movie extremely difficult. Elements 7 ships with 22 Instant Movie themes; you'll be able to download new themes too.

Elements 7 has a new feature called VideoMerge, which is supposed to simplify the process of taking video that was shot with a single-color background and superimposing it on another video (for that supercool TV weatherperson look). When you drop a clip on top of another clip in the timeline, and Elements detects a solid background, it will ask whether you want to use VideoMerge; alternatively, you can initiate the process manually. The feature worked quite well with footage supplied by Adobe, but far worse with my own blue-screen-background footage: Despite its supplying a tolerance slider, the background video showed through my foreground video. Elements 7 won't let you apply effects to specific areas of the video frame, so it's difficult (though not impossible) to mask areas where background video that shows through.

Inspirational Editing

I was more impressed with Premiere Elements 7's Inspiration Browser, which provides Web-based tutorial videos in a floating window. When I first looked at the beta version of Elements, most of the tutorials available had been produced by Adobe and other professional outfits such as Lynda.com, but Adobe says that it will add more content over time; the company also offers a mechanism for users to submit their own tutorials (which must be approved by Adobe).

Elements now recognizes AVCHD content from high-definition camcorders, though it will burn Blu-ray Discs only in H.264 or MPEG-2 format (not in AVCHD) and with a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 interlaced (not progressive). Nevertheless, those are pretty good options for a consumer video-editing application.

You can still upload videos to YouTube, of course, and Elements 7 has a new higher-quality setting for uploading content to that site. But you can't, for example, see which videos you've uploaded to Photoshop.com from within Elements, so it's strictly a one-way link. And despite Adobe's claim last year that it would add other video-sharing services, it remains limited to YouTube.

The upgrades to Premiere Elements 7 didn't strike me as very compelling. I like the addition of downloadable walkthroughs and templates, the Smart Tags, and the ability to sync files without thinking about it. But the interface needs some housecleaning, Elements' integration with Photoshop.com is pretty thin, and its integration with third-party services even thinner. More Webbiness is fine, but what I really want is more YouTubiness.

Corel Videostudio Pro X2

This video editor is a great choice for those with underpowered PCs, and a pretty good choice for those with fast systems, too.

Video is moving to high definition faster than a dog to a doughnut. So which do you buy first: a new HD camcorder, or a powerful new computer on which to edit its footage? If you choose the camcorder, Corel's $100 VideoStudio Pro X2 video editing application may be able to help you stave off the PC purchase for a while.

VideoStudio's new trick? Its updated Smart Proxy editing feature lets you create a lower-resolution version of a project that you can use to make edits, apply effects, and create menus, and when you're satisfied with how it looks, you tell the application to pull in the high-resolution source files to create the finished movie. Of course, when you do that with an underpowered PC, you'll have to take a walk while the PC struggles to process the huge files, but it's still a nice compromise.

While the image quality isn't great in Smart Proxy mode, you can see well enough to apply effects; in addition, you can scrub back and forth in the timeline with no lag, and files play quickly and smoothly. In other words, you can use the program just as easily as you could with standard-definition video (and perhaps even more easily, because the proxy-mode footage is at a lower resolution than most standard-resolution footage). Even in the middle of a project, you can easily enable and disable the Smart Proxy mode by clicking a button on the timeline.

Corel says that it increased the Smart Proxy feature's speed by 300 percent over the preceding VideoStudio 11.5. Furthermore, VideoStudio X2 is supposed to be optimized for quad-core CPUs and to take advantage of newer Intel CPUs that recognize SSE4 instructions, thereby providing a big performance boost on systems using them.

However, on my test system--a Dell XPS M1730 laptop with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 400GB RAID array--high-resolution AVCHD clips played back very slowly, at perhaps just one or two frames per second, and they looked jaggy even with Smart Proxy disabled. On a more powerful system, a workstation with dual quad-core Intel Xeon processors, the performance improved markedly in both Smart Proxy and default modes. Corel says that it is working to ensure smooth high-definition playback in future updates to the application.

In spite of these playback issues, finished projects looked fine. VideoStudio Pro X2 imports HDV, AVCHD, BDMV (files from Blu-ray camcorders, but such devices haven't yet arrived in this country), and it exports to BDAV, BDMV, and AVCHD formats. For comparison, Adobe's Premiere Elements 7 outputs only to BDAV and BDMV. (Corel says that 25 percent of its customers already import and output to AVCHD.)

It's also now easier to upload directly to YouTube; the feature was in VideoStudio 11.5, but X2 requires fewer steps. You can create iPod- and cell phone-friendly files too, though you have to take care of getting them onto those devices yourself.

Create With Paint

A new tool called Painting Creator lets you create and record amusing, moving overlays for your movies. Within a window, you choose from 11 types of paint brushes (you can customize their size and orientation), 38 different textures, and a full color palette, and then click a button to start recording.

You then paint on the canvas (which is either blank or one of your clips) while the tool records. Once you drop the result into the timeline, the recording will play back as an overlay. It's a fun, easy-to-use tool, but it's not terribly sophisticated. You can, for example, stop drawing, change the color and size of the brush, and resume drawing, but the transitions are abrupt, because in this tool, you can't use keyframes, the selection of a specific video frame where an effect begins to work and another frame where it stops.

VideoStudio Pro X2 also includes some fun Flash animations that you can drop in over the top of your video. The application has an import function, but you can't download new animations from within the program, and Corel doesn't offer any on its site, either.

Dialog boxes and filter and effects controls have been enlarged, making them more accessible and easier to see than the controls in Premiere Elements; you can adjust the size of some thumbnails, too. But some controls still seem a bit small. The interface also lets you resize some windows--about the same level of customization afforded by Elements, but nothing too exciting. For the most part, the interface is pretty functional; however, you won't see many options in the timeline. I prefer seeing, for example, a representation of the transparency level for video tracks and the volume level in audio tracks, and keyframes in each so that I can see exactly where those levels change, as Elements provides; VideoStudio makes you open a dialog box. This is one area where I consider Elements easier to use.

But I did find one timeline feature in VideoStudio that I really like: When you drag one clip into the timeline on top of another, VideoStudio will automatically insert your default transition, and you can set the length of the transition by adjusting the clips' overlapping points. It's a neat new time saver.

VideoStudio X2 has a slightly better range of features than Elements, and VideoStudio's tools are easier to see than Elements'. Elements still has a few unique features that I like--for example, better timeline features. I'd say VideoStudio X2 is the better choice if you have an underpowered PC, and Elements gets the nod for those with fast PCs.

Firefox Extension Blocks Dangerous Web Attack

A popular free security tool for the Firefox browser has been upgraded to block one of the most dangerous and troubling security problems facing the Web today.

NoScript is a small application that integrates into Firefox. It blocks scripts in programming languages such as JavaScript and Java from executing on untrusted Web pages. The scripts could be used to launch an attack on a PC.

The latest release of NoScript, version 1.8.2.1, will stop so-called "clickjacking," where a person browsing the Web clicks on a malicious, invisible link without realizing it, said Giorgio Maone, an Italian security researcher who wrote and maintains the program.

Clickjacking has been known for several years but is drawing attention again after two security researchers, Robert Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman, warned last month of new scenarios that could compromise a person's privacy or even worse, steal money from a bank account.

Unfortunately, clickjacking is possible due to a fundamental design feature in HTML that allows Web sites to embed content from other Web pages, Maone said. Nearly all Web browsers are vulnerable to a clickjacking attack.

"It's a very hard thing to fix because it's part of the very fabric of the Web and the browser," Maone said.

The embedded content can be invisible but a person can still unknowingly interact with it. A clickjacking attack takes advantage of that by tricking a user into clicking on a button that appears to do some function but actually does something entirely different.

Clickjacking can also be accomplished by manipulating the plug-ins of other applications, such as Adobe's Flash program and Microsoft's Silverlight. For example, researchers in recent days have shown it's possible for a clickjacking attack to turn on a person's Web camera and microphone without their knowledge.

In an advisory on Tuesday, Adobe said it will issue a patch for Flash by the end of the month.

The new improvement to NoScript, called ClearClick, can detect if there is a hidden, embedded element within the Web page. It then displays a warning message asking the user if they still want to click on it.

Maone said ClearClick will likely stop all clickjacking attempts. NoScript is only for the Firefox browser, so users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- the most-used browser in the world -- are vulnerable.

Web site owners, however, can take one step to prevent their users from falling victim, Maone said. Programmers can use a script on their Web sites that checks to see if a Web page is embedded in another page. If so, the script forces the good Web page in front, preventing clickjacking, Maone said.

The technique is called "framebusting." Ebay's online payments service, PayPal, which is frequently targeted by cybercriminals, has already implemented framebusting, Maone said. NoScript will allow a framebusting script to run, Maone said.

"The best thing that can happen is that Web site owners start to think more carefully about security," Maone said. "It is important that Web site owners spread the word that they should implement framebusting."

Clickjacking is a serious, potentially long-term problem for browser developers. Since the attack is enabled by a feature within HTML, it demands changes to the HTML specification.

Web standards groups are currently working on HTML 5, a specification that will incorporate new features into the programming language to accommodate future Web design. But the standards process moves slowly, and changes to HTML could break existing Web pages, Maone said.

"For the user, I'm afraid there's no fix but NoScript for the time being," he said.

Netbooks Will Boost Adoption of Linux, Says Novell CTO

A surge in demand for netbooks is helping drive business for Linux, as the devices are designed to be low-cost with smaller storage, according to Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for Linux.

" People typically don't care what operating system is on the netbooks, because they don't buy them to run a suite of applications like Microsoft Office, but to be on the Web using a Web browser," Nat Friedman said in an interview with IDG News Service. Novell's SUSE Linux is already being pre-loaded with laptops from vendors including Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. The company is now in negotiations with Lenovo and HP to start offering its Linux distribution on their netbooks as well, he added.

Netbooks are a new category of computing devices that are low-cost and designed for continuous Internet connectivity.

In June, Novell announced that Micro-Star International of Taiwan would pre-install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its Wind netbook.

Most of the low-cost netbooks will run Linux, to avoid the higher cost of the Windows operating system, and also because most of them have about 2G bytes of flash storage, for which Linux is more suitable, Friedman said.

The benefit of pre-loaded SUSE Linux for the user is that Novell works with the computer vendor to ensure that all the Linux device drivers are there, and the user has a far better experience than if he were to try to install the operating system on a variety of hardware, Friedman said.

Making software installation easier is also a key element of Novell's software appliances strategy for servers. Installing the operating system and applications on a computer can be labor-intensive, and sometimes requires expertise, Friedman said. "This slows down the sales cycle, because if I want to sell some software, and the first step is for the user to install it and it is a difficult and long process, it makes it difficult for me to make my sale," he added.

Novell announced in April a SUSE Appliance Program to enable ISVs (independent software vendors) to create appliances combining their applications with the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform in an integrated package for end-customer deployment. Novell also announced the beta release of SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS, a minimized version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform that ISVs can embed in appliances.

Competitor Red Hat has also announced a strategy around software appliances.

The operating system will become an embedded component, rather than something that the customer chooses, said Friedman. " When you buy a car you don't typically choose the engine, or what type of transmission it has," he added.

Using virtualization technology, the software bundle can work on a variety of platforms running a virtual machine, and also share hardware with other appliances, Friedman said.

The software appliances model will enable the ISV to for example create a virtual machine image which contains the application and the operating system pre-installed, and the user can take the file and run it in a one-step process on the virtual machine he has installed, Friedman said. Post-sales support issues will also get reduced, as most of them arise because the original installation was not proper, he added.

Novell has developed SUSE Studio, an online Web-based tool that enables ISVs to quickly build, configure and test software appliances, even if they don't have operating system expertise.

Mozilla Readies Firefox 3.1 Features

Mozilla Corp. will use a several-week delay it recently added to the Firefox 3.1 schedule to build a private browsing mode and beef up the browser's address bar, the company said today. Three weeks ago, the company said it would insert four to five more weeks into the timetable, part of a reaction to changes in the browser market, including the introduction by Google Inc. of its Chrome browser. Then, Mozilla said it would probably use the time to add a privacy mode and to punch up its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine performance.

A private browsing mode and fast JavaScript execution were touted by Google last month when it launched Chrome.

In meeting notes published on its Web site today, Mozilla said it planned to add the privacy feature in Beta 2 , which would likely be released in November according to Mozilla's current schedule.

Dubbed "porn mode" by some, privacy tools limit or entirely eliminate what the browser records as it travels the Internet. Typically, URLs are not recorded in the history, cookies are not saved and other evidence is purged from the computer at the end of the session. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, and Apple Inc.'s Safari all have private browsing built in.

Also set for debut in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2: changes to the already-available "Clear Private Data" tool that would let users select time and data ranges for retroactively erasing their browsing tracks, changes to the address bar to add privacy-related tagging and tab search, and a restoration of the plug-in installation process used in Firefox 2.0.

Already slated to appear in Beta 1, Mozilla said today, were support for the video HTML tag, tab bar tweaks, and the ability to drag a tab to the desktop to open a new browsing window.

Mozilla is also mulling over several other additions to Firefox 3.1, but has not committed to working them into the release. The most prominent would be an Opera-esque "Speed Dial" feature that would show user-selected or most-recent sites as thumbnails when the user opened a new tab. Google's Chrome sports a similar tool.

The developer who has taken charge of the proposed Firefox feature cited a pair of existing add-ons, Speed Dial and Fast Dial , as examples of what he was considering.

Mozilla made it clear, however, that those last-wave changes would not have priority. "We're also considering reviewed, solid, tested patches for some other small improvements but we will not hold Beta 2 for these," the meeting notes said.

Beta 1 is on track for release next week, while Beta 2 will be locked down Nov. 4 and released several weeks after that, Mozilla said. It has not committed to a ship date for Firefox 3.1, but has said it will shoot for a late-2008 or early-2009 release.

When Windows Update Won't Update

Wants to know why Windows is telling him that it can't install its own updates?

Windows Update occasionally gets a bee in its bonnet and refuses to work. Should that surprise anyone?

Unfortunately, unlike some other Windows problems, this one seldom goes away on its own. And the exact cause isn't always easy to diagnose and fix.

I'll start with some solutions to a very common, XP-specific Windows Update problem. Then I'll tell you where to go for additional advice.

If you're running Windows XP, and Windows Update tells you that one or more updates failed to install successfully, try my handy-dandy repair batch file. Actually, I've written two batch files--one for the 32-bit version of XP, and another for the 64-bit version. Simply download and run the appropriate one.

Unfortunately, when you try to download a batch file in Firefox, it merely displays the contents of the file (in plain, ASCII text) instead of downloading the file. The easiest workaround, other than using Internet Explorer, is to copy the text to Notepad and save it as a batch (.bat) file rather than as a default text (.txt) file.

When you run the batch file and it displays a message box, click OK.

If the batch file doesn't work, try using the Windows Update Agent. You can download versions for the 32-bit version of XP, the 64-bit version, and the Itanium. Once you've downloaded the file, perform the following steps:

1. Click Start, Run, Browse.

2. Locate and double-click the file you just downloaded. Doing so will insert the path and the file name into the run box.

3. Enter the text /wuforce (be sure to enter a space before the slash) after the file name. Press ENTER and follow the wizard.

If you aren't using XP, or if neither of the preceding fixes work, you might try downloading the problematic update manually and then installing it from your hard drive. That approach probably won't work, but it's worth a try. In Internet Explorer (not Firefox), go to the Microsoft Update Catalog to find and download the problem updates.

Finally, at the Windows Update Troubleshooter you stand a good chance of finding the cause of and solution to your particular problem. Once again, this Web page doesn't like any browser except Internet Explorer.

There's also a separate Vista Troubleshooter. And amazingly, this one works just fine in Firefox.

AMD Sells Digital TV Business to Broadcom

Advanced Micro Devices has agreed to sell its digital television business to Broadcom for US $192.8 million, as the chip maker fights to return to profitability, the companies announced Monday.

AMD's digital TV business, which includes processors, receivers and software for digital sets, will help round out Broadcom's DTV business, said Daniel Marotta, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Broadband Communications Group. Broadcom makes DTV receivers, processors and other products, including products for high-definition television.

"We believe that this deal will position Broadcom to be a leader in this market by significantly expanding our customer base, giving us the product breath needed to lead the market, and enabling us to achieve the scale needed to broadly compete," Marotta said during a press conference.

While Broadcom has focused on the middle to high-end of the DTV market, the acquisition will bring more budget-friendly products to the company, Marotta added. The combined DTV business will offer turn-key products that allow its customers to "rapidly configure and deploy productive televisions," he added.

AMD acquired its DTV business in 2006, as part of its $5.4 billion purchase of graphics chip vendor ATI. But AMD in July said it took a charge of $880 million in its second quarter related to the falling value of ATI's former digital TV and handheld business units. AMD reported a net loss of $1.19 billion in the second quarter of 2008, the seventh consecutive quarter the company lost money.

AMD is working to "transform the company, becoming leaner and more focused," Dirk Meyer, AMD's new president and CEO, said in a statement. The sale is a key step, "helping to strengthen our balance sheet, lower our break-even point, and hone our focus," he added.

Broadcom, however, said it was bullish about the future of AMD's DTV business. Broadcom expects the business unit's revenue in the second half of 2008 to be 50 percent higher than in the first half of the year, Marotta said. Digital televisions are expected to be the top selling consumer electronics device during the next five years, he added.

"The market is large and expected deliver strong growth into the future," Marotta added.

Broadcom will add about 530 employees -- 90 percent of them engineers -- in the transaction, Marotta said. As part of the deal, Broadcom will buy AMD's patents and patent applications related to DTV, he said.

The companies, both based in California, expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter of this year, pending government approvals.