Product Reviews

If you've bought an optical drive in the last few years, there's a good chance that you already own a copy of Nero. Starting off as the disc-burning underdog, it's since become the standard inclusion with most burners. However, with version 7 Nero grandly claims its software has become 'your own personal Hollywood movie studio'.

Ridiculous marketing claims aside, many of the changes to existing utilities are purely cosmetic, and many were already available in update downloads to version 6. The Start Smart front end has been tidied up, but it's much the same as before. The basic six headings are still there: Favorites, Data, Audio, Photo & Video, Copy & Backup, and Extras, although some categories have more options. The overall look of the full Burning ROM application has also been brought more up to date, but all the same buttons are there. One of the main enhancements is the ability to write to Blu-ray and HD-DVD, although given the paucity of burners, it's currently of academic interest.

The most surprising addition is accessed separately from Start Smart, however - Nero Home. This is an attempt to jump on the 'ten foot interface' bandwagon, making music, videos and photos accessible when using your PC from an

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armchair. It also links into Nero's new-found and rather bizarre support for TV tuners. Working in tandem with the Nero Scout indexing application, once you've configured which folders Nero Scout should search for audio and video files, it indexes them for you. The results are then available from most Nero components, and there's a special entry added to Windows Explorer as well.

The Nero Digital format, the company's own flavour of MPEG4, has been extended to include video, and even includes AVC (Advanced Video Coding), also known as H.264. The company has already managed to get support into DVD players from the likes of Grundig and KiSS, so it's clearly serious about its intentions in this direction.

The Recode 2 application lets you import all manner of video files, including non-encrypted DVDs, and create Nero Digital files and discs. Video will be squashed to fit the chosen destination disc size, and the MPEG4 compression means file sizes can be a lot smaller than with MPEG2. You can even maintain 5.1 surround soundtracks.

Nero PhotoSnap, which was also added in later versions of Nero 6, is a basic image-editing application - handy for those quick cropping jobs or red-eye reduction, but not much more. BackItUp, for backing up files and whole hard disks to optical media, has reached version 2. The main difference between this and the first version (included with Nero 6) is a more user-friendly interface for browsing your backups by calendar date. It also now supports backing up to an FTP site.

Nero provides a lot of useful tools in Premium 7, but nowhere near as many as Roxio Easy Media Creator 8. There isn't a huge number of new features in this version other than interface aesthetics. For this reason, it isn't a compelling buy - especially as Roxio's suite costs only £3 more.