When you install Nero 8 Ultra, no fewer than
22 individual apps take up residence on
your PC. Some cover very specifi c tasks,
such as DriveSpeed (which, as you might
guess, tests the speed of your drive). Others
are much more ambitious, like Nero Home,
a Media Center–like interface that serves
as an entertainment hub for music and
video playback, TV streaming and record-
ing, and content sharing over a network,
all via a large living-room-friendly interface.
Newcomers to Nero will appreciate the
SmartStart app, which installs with a desk-
top shortcut, and helps make sense of the
mayhem by presenting a more manageable
number of categories and common tasks,
e.g., “Rip and Burn,” that then lead you to
a suitable app. It’s helpful, but it’s defi nitely
geared toward newbs. For instance, when
you choose to create an audio disc or copy
data, SmartStart takes you to Nero Express
rather than Burning ROM—the more power-
ful, feature-rich program.
Such concessions to novice users,
however, are actually pretty minimal in
Nero, especially when compared to Easy
Media Creator 10. We appreciate a degree
of assumed sophistication, but Nero is
sometimes too sparse with information,
leaving it up to users to hunt and pecktheir way around an unfamiliar app.
The meat and potatoes of the Nero
suite are Burning ROM, Recode, and
Vision. And these three applications are
virtually unchanged from their Nero 7 ver-
sions in terms of functionality. That’s a
good thing, for the most part.
Burning ROM remains a one-stop shop
for burning audio, video, and data to a CD
or DVD, and we continue to appreciate its
straightforward interface, reliability, and arrayof options. The app also supports burning
data discs to HD DVD and Blu-ray media.
Recode is still the place to go for video
conversion, such as when you want to com-
press the contents of a double-layer DVD
into a fi le that will fi t on a single-layer disc,
or compress the latter into something better
suited for a portable player. Recode does it
well, keeping all the elements of the source
material intact and offering a comforting
degree of tweakability. You can, for instance,
adjust the compression quality of all the sec-
ondary elements of a movie, such as menus
and extras, in order to achieve higher quality
in the main movie. And Nero’s extensive list
of “fi t to target” options makes it easy to
achieve the perfect amount of compression
for a given device. A notable shortcoming
of Recode, however, is its use of the Nero
Digital fi le format. While this MPEG-4-based
codec is compatible with a number of devic-
es, it’s no substitute for more open stan-
dards, such as DivX and Xvid. We couldn’t,
for example, stream a Nero Digital video fi le
to our Xbox.
For its part, Nero Vision lets you create,
author, and burn video discs. As in Nero
7, this app provides a timeline for editing
footage, slots for two audio tracks, a hand-
ful of effects and transitions, and a number
of menu options (the download of Nero 8
comes with just a couple menu templates,
but many more are available for free from
the Nero website). These features are avail-
able to AVCHD video as well as standard-
def formats. And new to Nero 8 is support
for Blu-ray authoring (BD-AV), although
there are currently no menus, effects, orhttp://www.maximumpc.com | APR 08 | MAXIMUMPC 51
NERO
Nero 8 Ultra
A no-nonsense approach to excess
Recode would be the ideal format-conversion app if it offered support for
more formats.Nero’s SmartStart front end doesn’t take you to every Nero app by default, but you
can easily add your favorites.