[Article] Nero 7 released, but a fizzer

Nero 7 is now available. A trial demo is available for free download. I downloaded it today to see what was new.

I had been looking forward to this release but was very disappointed. Almost all the changes are superficial changes to the “skin”. There appeared to only be two new features. There is a lack-lustre addition of Blue-ray disc support, but it seems to only support the basic file system, no video features. The other addition appears to be some TV tuner card app that can watch and record shows from TV. This is probably a useful program, but I have not got a tuner card so I couldn’t do much with it.

Nero Vision is now called Nero Vision 4, but hardly deserves a full version number increase as it is the same as as the Nero vision 3. It appears to have inherited the same problem as 3.1.0.14 and 3.1.0.16. A 41 minute AVI file was going to take 2 hours 20 minutes to encode to a DVD. The same settings with 3.1.0.11 took 1 hour.

There appears to be no justification to calling this new version Nero 7, rather than just a minor version increase with version 6. I expect it is has been driven by marketing. Nero want to release a full new version so they can resell the same product back to people who already have it, rather than them just getting a free upgrade.

So my recommendation is to use Nero 6.6.0.16 with Nero Vision 3.1.0.11 (From the Nero 6.6.0.14 distribution)