Ahead Nero 7 Premium review

Like Roxio's Creator, Nero started life as a simple CD burning program.

Nero 7 Premium now includes so many programs that we can't help wondering whether one day it will be the only piece of software you'll need on your PC. For the time being, however, it's limited to tasks involving DVD or CD burners - and video, photo and audio files.

This latest version includes 14 separate programs as well various utilities and behind the scenes applications. Many of these remain unchanged from Nero 6, while various other programs, that were previously released as free updates, are now included as part of Nero 7.

The most exciting of these are MediaHome and PhotoSnap. The former is a program that can 'stream' music, videos and digital images to any device in your home that supports the UPnP protocol. What this means is that you can play a video or piece of music on the PC with Nero installed, and watch it on another device, for instance a TV that has a compatible media receiver plugged into it. Most media receivers have their own streaming software, but it's not always that well designed, so MediaHome is a handy addition. PhotoSnap is a simple, but effective, photo-fixing tool that allows you to view pictures saved in most image formats and perform basic photo-editing.

The main disc-burning utility, Burning ROM 7, now includes a sub-utility for encoding audio files to and from WAV, MP3, WMA and AAC formats. Ahead also mentions support for Blu-Ray on its Web site, but with no drives yet available we'll have to take its word for it.

The video-editing and DVD-authoring applications have been combined into a single program - Nero Vision 4. This boasts some impressive new features, such as support for HDV cameras and the ability to encode surround sound Dolby Digital soundtracks. Both of these features are rare among specialist video-editing software, let alone general disc burning applications. However, the basic editing facilities are crude and surround mixes must be made in a separate music production program, so it's highly unlikely that video-editing enthusiasts will settle for Nero's editing facilities.

Nero Scout, the new media-cataloguing tool, is unusual in that it resides in My Computer and behaves like any other drive. You select which directories to scan and then Scout sorts any music files it finds by album, artist or genre; and photos and videos by album and date. When you open the Scout icon in My Computer, all the music is displayed as if it were stored in Scout. This makes finding and browsing your files very quick, and because it's part of My Computer the Scout folder can be browsed by other programs. However, we found it slow to access and ridiculously slow to catalogue our MP3 collection.

The most surprising addition to the suite is Nero Home, which is a shameless copy of the media features in Windows XP Media Center Edition. It uses the Nero Scout database to access music, video and photo collections, and can also display and time-shift television from an analogue tuner. However, it lacks the slickness of Windows Media Center and we had difficulties getting a Pinnacle TV tuner to work with it.

Nero 7 Premium remains a great value bundle of programs and the fact that the new additions aren't perfect doesn't detract from the value of the rest of the suite. However, Roxio's Easy Media Creator 8 Suite is the more polished of the two, and while its line-up of programs is slightly less comprehensive, its video, DVD and photo editors are more accomplished.