Product Reviews

Despite its dominance, Nero has traditionally offered a slightly old-fashioned interface. With version 8, however, its look has been significantly cleaned up and its features streamlined. You still get 14 bundled apps and eight utilities, but the product feels a lot more focused than the previous few versions and nowhere near as bloated as Roxio's Easy Media Creator 10 Suite.

The primary change focuses on the new StartSmart interface. This provides direct access to basic tools for burning data and audio discs, ripping audio and disc copying using four icons down the left. Thanks to this, it's become much more than just an aggregating front end, especially as you don't need to load the individual apps as you did before.

Buttons along the top divide the full apps into five categories, and you can place your own custom selection in the Launch Applications pane on the Start Page. Rip and Burn contains the core apps for taking data to and from discs. Create and Edit includes audio and video encoding, photo editing and disc labelling. The Home Entertainment section houses playback features, including TV watching and PVR features (for which you'll need extra hardware). Finally, there's a tab housing Nero's backup facilities. Some of Nero's utilities aren't featured in StartSmart at all anymore, including the handy but niche DriveSpeed and BurnRights.

As with Roxio's suite, Nero has features aimed specifically at Windows Vista. The DiscCopy Sidebar Gadget lets you copy a disc in any format simply by inserting the disc in your drive and clicking on the Gadget. You can also drag and drop files to write them to disc. Although drag-and-drop utilities like this have existed for some time, at least now there's a tidy place to put them in the Windows Vista interface.

Many of Nero 8's new features revolve around Nero Vision 5, the video disc-authoring tool. A host of new menu transition effects have

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been added, including 25 new SD and HD templates. Most of these are conventional 2D menus, but the three Smart 3D ones incorporate eye-catching 3D animations and menu layouts. Vision 5 also supports burning to HD DVD and Blu-ray, putting Nero Vision 5 ahead of MyDVD as bundled with Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Suite.

Another feature that places Nero ahead of Roxio is importing AVCHD. We were easily able to load files from an HDV camcorder and author them into a DVD - you can also write them to Blu-ray to preserve the video quality. Vision also supports HD-Burn, the new system pioneered by Sanyo for burning up to 1.4GB to a standard 700MB CD-R.

Vision 5 has also now been integrated with internet video-sharing services. Six months ago, this was still a rare feature, but it's becoming a mere checkbox these days. At least Nero supports a number of different services, including YouTube and MySpace, plus My Nero. You simply supply the login and password for your chosen online service, and Nero Vision handles the encoding and uploading. However, you need to ensure you've chosen the right path from the beginning within Vision, which is Make Movie. You can't, for example, create a DVD project and then output it to the web instead.

A number of Nero's features have also been integrated into the Windows Media Center interface. You can access local Nero-streaming servers to watch shared content and burn a variety of disc types within Media Center. When burning video, you can choose any of Vision's menu templates. Nero ShowTime links directly to My Nero community as well. You can add web media to the playlist, but setting this up is complicated. In fact, it's so complicated we couldn't add streaming services at all, and the Help files weren't comprehensive enough to assist.

Another promising new addition to the toolset is RescueAgent, which is supposed to be able to recover files from damaged discs and interrupted recording. However, when we simulated a failed burn by rebooting the PC in the middle of writing files to CD, attempting to read it with RescueAgent caused the application to hang repeatedly, and it doesn't appear to work with Blu-ray discs, either.

So it's not perfect. And comparing Nero 8 with Roxio's EMC 10, the latter still has the edge on quantity of features for the money. But Nero's abilities are directly aimed at its core market: burning files to disc in an orderly and flexible way. If that's what you're looking for, the favour swings firmly back towards Nero.