Almost everyone with a CD-RW drive knows about Nero. The software that is developed by the German company Ahead has been bundled with almost every brand of CD-RW drive available on the market. Also DVD recorders are often bundled with a CD containing Nero Burning ROM and recently the company took up a new challenge and released Nero 6 bringing Nero to a new era.
The software is no longer only a burning solution, it's a multimedia suite on its own. Not only did Ahead introduce a lot of new applications, the company is also hoping to conquerer the video market with its MPEG-4 codec Nero Digital which should eventually replace the likes of e.g DivX and Xvid.
Nero 6
When Nero 6 appeared on the market there was a decent amount of complaints and Ahead did fix a lot of bugs. Because we were intrested in the current developments we talked to Jim Corbett, one of the main people at Ahead. One of the questions is if users are willing to pay to upgrade to Nero 6; "Nero 6 is no longer just a CD Recording application, but rather a complete media suite containing almost all the elements you would ever need in the CD or DVD creation process", said Corbett. "Of course if all you want to do is simply burn CD's, then maybe Nero 5.5 is more than enough. But those users wanting an all in one product suite capable of everything from authoring, encoding, transcoding, recoding DVDs, video editing, MPEG-4, DVD playback, and so on, we'd like to think that Nero 6 is a worthy upgrade", he added.
Buying the software in its full is an option but still many users seem hope to receive Nero 6 with any new drive they are going to purchase. "With so many DVD recordable drives coming onto the market in 2004, it is a major target for us to be included in any bundles. Having such a complete product suite gives us significant advantages we believe, because an OEM doesn't need to go elsewhere to find the various components that constitute a recordable DVD package", said Corbett.
But can users expect to receive a complete Nero 6 package with a drive, or is it more realistic that drive manufacturers will only ship certain parts of the package such as only Nero Burning ROM 6 and Nero Vision Express? "Many OEM bundles will be based around Nero Express 6.0, but this will still include other products such as Recode, NeroVision Express, ShowTime, and importantly technologies such as Nero Digital", he continues. "When a customer buys a DVD/RW drive from one of our partners, we certainly don't want them to be disappointed in the software, even though Nero 6 retail, is continually involving as a premium application."
Indeed the software is evolving, Ahead is releasing an upgrade every month and altough they fix bugs and introduce new features there are many users complaining that every update is a big download (up to 20Mb). Certainly users on a dial up have a hard time getting their so much needed updates. We asked Mr. Corbett if Ahead is planning to release smaller upgrade files; "In many ways its one of the drawbacks of having so many features contained in a product suite '“ bigger file sizes", he said. We've already split the likes of main Nero program and the video tools into separate downloads, and we're constantly reviewing how we can make updates more easily available to users not on fast connections".
New markets
With Nero 6 another new application was introduced called Nero Recode. The software allows consumers to shrink the size of a DVD-9 movie to a DVD-5 disc (DVD Recordable). This was a suprising move and Nero Recode seems to be software that is/will be able to compete with packages such as CloneDVD, DVD2One, DVDxCopy and such. We asked Mr. Corbett if Ahead is aming to take part of the transcoding software market. "Our aim has not been to enter the DVD copying arena to compete specifically with the many applications already out there", he answered.
"We wanted to give the users much more: a complete all-in-one and easy-to-use application for recoding their DVDs in a fast and high quality way. Recode is a tremendous concept in itself and I think it was a pleasant surprise to our users that this unique product was actually free with Nero", he added.
Besides Nero Recode also a part of the Nero package is Nero Digital. This is an audio/video codec that is able to compete with DivX and Xvid as we recently tested, however the userbase of the codec can't compete with those of DivX and Xvid.
We asked Mr. Corbett about the future of Nero Digital; "Nero Digital is not a standard in itself, but rather a complete audio/video compression solution based around MPEG-4. We feel the possibilities are endless as connectivity is becoming a big word in consumer electronics convergence. Therefore it gives us an opportunity to take our technology outside of our main core business. We're very excited about Nero Digital development, and during CeBIT, we will announce some major enhancements. Therefore a lot to look forward to I think."
Source: CD Freaks.com
