Nero 7

[Mercutio]

Thanks to my job as an IT trainer, I have a brand-spanking new retail copy of Nero 7 Ultra Edition sitting here on my desk. I plan to try it out over the next couple days and post my thoughts.

First few things

1. The installation required two reboots. When did I go back in time to 1998?
2. Nero itself is same-old-same old, superficially the same as Nero6. However, there seem to be a larger set of options than I remember from older versions
3. My favorite thing so far: When you're making a data CD, if you put more stuff than can go on CD media, Nero asks you if you'd rather make a DVD.
4. Nero Recode is jaw-dropping fast on an A64X2. I'm just playing with short clips right now, and I haven't played with encoding anything except MPEG2 in ages. It's still much quicker than I expected.
5. Nero Showtime: PowerDVD it ain't, but it does have a nice option to reduce drive noise while playing back a movie. It either doesn't work with my LiteOn drive, or my LiteOn drive is already fairly quiet, 'cause I didn't really notice a difference when I tried it.

And those are my impressions for now.

 

[timwhit]

How large was your installation?

I can't remember the version that I recently installed at home, but if I would have installed all the options it looked like it would have taken up about 700MB.

I don't really think I need all those extra programs that Nero now includes. I install it for the purpose of burning CDs and DVDs and nothing else. If I want to encode a MPEG2 file I will use another program.

 

[Mercutio]

There's about 200MB of nero-related stuff on this machine. That's the full install.

NeroVision is a nice, barebones DVD authoring app. I don't know how it stacks up to Ulead DVD MovieFactory, but I see that it has options to create 16x9 or 4x3 movies. That by itself is its own sort of improvement.

Nero Recode turns video or DVD files into MPEG4. This may be a damned sexy little program. When I get home I'll run it against a 4GB .AVI file to see how long encoding takes and what kind of quality I get. I'll have to try it against divx6 Creator, I suppose, since it does the same thing.

And the Wave Editor is a pretty good tool.

There's an application called MediaHome which is supposed to simplify sharing media files across a network. I don't know how well it works, and I don't suppose I, or anyone else here, is in the target market for that program.

There's a 10-foot-interface program called Nero Home. Not sure I really get that one yet, either.

Um... and there's PhotoSnap, a slideshow maker (meh), and SoundTrax, a mutlitrack sound editor that supports AC3 for up to 7.1 discrete channels (wow, but what would I ever do with that?). And the CD cover designer, which no one in the history of time has ever used.

More hits than misses IMO.

 

[Groltz]

Try to record an audio CD that has a zero-second gap between the first and second songs and the second-last and last songs while having the default 2-second gap between all the rest. (15 songs total)

It can't do it and screws up every damned time. :cursin:

That was using the 2nd Nero 7 release: v7.1.2

That scenario used to work OK in the v6 iterations.

I had to use Feurio! to get that project done properly.

 

[LunarMist]

Has anyone tried Nero7 on an older system under Win 98SE? According to the box it works in 98SE, but I would like to be sure. It also mentions an 800MHz PIII is required, but the notebook has only a 600MHz CPU.

 

[mubs]

How about an update, Merc? Is it worth upgrading to 7 Ultra from 6 Ultra? I'm quite interested in the authoring / encoding enhancements in 7. Tell us, will ya? Thanks.

 

[mubs]

Mostly very negative reviews on PriceGrabber, a few positive ones. Interesting contradictions.

 

[Mercutio]

I like 7 better than 6, actually. I love how well NeroVision and Nero Recode work.

NeroVision is at this point my favoritest windows app, just because it properly and automatically handles aspect ratio and will stretch DVD bitrates as far as you tell it - most DVD authoring tools puke after 2 or 4 hours, but I made a disc with all ~10 hours of "Weeds" for my parents and it worked fine (crummy bitrate, but they were watching it on a long car trip, so it wasn't an issue).

Also, I had issues with Nero 6 freezing (not responding) on a couple of my machines under certain conditions. Those problems seem to have gone away with v7.

As a burning application... it makes boot CDs, data discs, miniDVDs and video DVDs. I don't really make music discs, something Groltz had a complaint about. Burning Rom and Express are pretty much the same programs they have been since version 5 with some very slight UI changes.

Nero7 absolutely has to be installed "Custom". There's a lot of cruft in the full install. I can see that they're trying for a full media-handling setup, but I don't care for their image viewer/catalog, their 10' HTPC interface, their CD cover designer or some of the other crap. Also, Nero Scout, an indexing service for media files, can only be removed by unregistering some DLLs after Nero is installed. Only takes a second, but I'd rather uncheck a box during the install.

If it wasn't for Recode and Nerovision, I don't think the upgrade would be worthwhile, but those two apps are worthwhile enough that I actually paid for a retail copy of my own, outside of the copies I bought for work (er... and the one I stole from the internet).

 

[Bozo]

Have you tried 7 Ultra on a dual layer DVD yet?

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

Nope, just DVD Decrypter for that.

 

[LunarMist]

Oh this is an old thread! FWIW, I have not seen much difference between 6 and 7, but I don't use all of the features. It turned out that Nero 7 ran fine on the ancient P3 600 notebook even burning DVDs. The version on the retail CD was problematic but the downloaded update (>100MB) was fine.

 

[Mercutio]

Nero 8 was released a couple weeks ago.
I can't for the life of me figure out why it has a new version number.

 

[Handruin]

Maybe bug fixes, or new colors in the logo?

 

[Bozo]

Nero 8 was released a couple weeks ago.
I can't for the life of me figure out why it has a new version number.

To get people to spend their money.

Bozo :joker:

 

[LiamC]

I have attempted to create some music video's from separate sources, and Nero 6's NeroVision has some serious limitations. If the sources are mixed (NTSC/PAL), then trying to encode NTSC into PAL makes the video unwatchable—horribly pixellated. This is partly due to the destination, a 37" HD LCD. NeroVision upscales the NTSC source, and then the TV does the same (trying to make them fit on a 1366x768 screen). Encoding all the clips as NTSC gets around the problem.

The lack of individual volume adjustment for each track like Nero SoundTrax can do for audio is a real pain though. I'd upgrade in a flash if 8 could do that.