There was a time when, having forked out hundreds of dollars on a new PC and got it home, you quickly discovered that you couldn’t do much with it until you spent hundreds of dollars more on software. Video and audio editing, optical disc burning and media management was once beyond the capabilities of the freshly unboxed desktop PC.
With the advent of Cloud computing applications and open-source software, those days are all but over, but it seems one-time market leader Nero is stuck in the past. Its media creation suite, now in its ninth iteration, is full of stuff that’s either available free online, or replicated in Windows Vista’s own collection of free software and utilities.
Choose to install Nero 9 in its entirety, and you’ll find your system flooded with bits and bobs: in fact, a total of 15 items are added to your Start menu once the lengthy process is complete – and that doesn’t include the backup utility, which is installed separately. It’s an impressive-looking number, especially considering the low price of the suite, but pay closer attention and you’ll quickly realise that it’s considerably less exciting than first impressions suggest.
Take the new TV tool, Nero Live, for instance. This is an application for controlling your TV card, time shifting and recording programmes. It supports up to four TV tuner adapters, has a picture-in-picture mode, allows you to record to H.264 and lets you watch TV in your Vista Sidebar. But with Microsoft’s Vista Home and Ultimate operating systems including the already capable Media Center component, and most TV tuners shipping with similar branded software that does the same job, it seems somewhat surplus to requirements.
The bundle also comes with a video editor included, but suffers a similar fate. It’s fiddly and complicated to use and somewhat basic in its features. Only one video track is supported, there’s no way of adding picture-in-picture support, and audio cannot be edited in place. We’d rather use Windows Movie Maker – although it’s similarly basic, it’s much easier to use.
And the theme continues. There’s Showtime – a media player that boasts the ability to aggregate the contents of your network’s media servers. But beyond that it offers little advantage over Windows Media Player. And then there’s a photo viewer that “turns your PC into a photo album”; we’re wondering why anyone would use this instead of Google’s excellent Picasa 3.
On the audio front, there’s more lightweight frippery, with a basic wave editor and multitrack mixer. The former can be replaced adequately with free tools such as Audacity. And, although the latter is reasonably powerful, allowing you to cross-fade MP3 tracks, apply stereo panning in real-time and output 5.1 or even 7.1 soundtracks for your videos, it’s fiddly to use. You cannot, for example, edit tracks in place; instead, you have to go out to the separate wave editor to edit the audio.
Nero 9’s true worth, however, isn’t realised in the extras but the more technical side of media encoding, decoding and burning. First, there’s a wide variety of codecs included in the installation. Normally you’d have to scour the web for different encoders and decoders and install them as and when necessary, but Nero supplies everything on a plate for you, and there’s a pretty big choice. Playback compatibility is particularly impressive, but encoding for video and audio formats is also good, plus there’s now support for easy video upload to YouTube, MySpace and My Nero. It’s worth noting, however, that Nero 8 was just as good – the only major addition this time around is support for FLAC lossless audio encoding.
The selection of disc and drive information, rescue and recover and burning tools is useful, too, and includes support for many different disc types and formats, including Blu-ray. You have to buy a $US9.99 plug-in for the latter luxury, but it’s about $34 cheaper than the equivalent add-on for rival Roxio Creator 2009. Plus, having access to this all in one place from one simple control panel is, without doubt, a time-saving convenience.
And this just about saves Nero 9’s bacon. Individually, its applications don’t convince, but it’s a good choice if you want something that will take care of most of your media needs in one fell swoop. It doesn’t have the polish of Roxio’s Easy Media Creator 2009 offering, or quite the number of extras, but it’s better value for HD burning.