Re: Nero Multimedia Suite HD Platinum 11.0.15500 And Patent Activation
Sibyl Piccuillo
If you start Nero Video by itself (without coming from MediaHome), you'll get a bare-bones looking page divided into three sections of choices, Capture & Import, Edit, and Create and Export. The last offers Blu-ray, AVCHD (for getting HD content on standard DVD media), DVD, and Video CD option. The editing choices range from the simple and automatic to Advanced Movie. The automatic theme applied pan and zoom to still, intro and outro, and an appealing background soundtrack.
Basic things like lighting and color adjustments are at your service, but you also get loads of artsy effects like crystallized and retro looks. Text and clip art are other options. A trimmer lets you set in and out points, even displaying frame numbers. There's a green-screen effect (aka Chrome Key), but this doesn't work as well as the one in Premiere Elements; Nero's made it hard to mask out my green background. There's even stabilization that does a decent job of smoothing shaky video.
Nero Multimedia Suite HD Platinum 11.0.15500 and Patent Activation
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The online backup service from Nero, BackItUp, also gets a tile on the suite's start screen, but it's really a separate service. It offers multi-target backups to local disks as well as cloud backup. Anyone can get a free online backup account with 5GB storage, but for automated backup or more storage you need a plan, which run from $19.99 a year to $49.99 a year for unlimited storage.
PC hardware is nice, but it\u2019s not much use without innovative software. I\u2019ve been reviewing software for PCMag since 2008, and I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time.\u00a0I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I\u2019ve witnessed every Microsoft win and misstep up to the latest Windows 11.
Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech, and before that I headed up PCMag\u2019s enterprise software team, but I\u2019m happy to be back in the more accessible realm of consumer software. I\u2019ve attended trade shows of Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
A lot of people probably think of Nero as a maker of disc-burning software. The present suite still includes utilities for burning CDs, DVDs, and now even Blu-rays with chapters and all the other formatting those media are capable of, but it's evolved way beyond spinning optical media. Nero 2014 Platinum's new strength is transcoding media for all your devices, from moving DVDs to your smart phone or playing your own video to a large HDTV. It does a lot, and mostly works well, but there are still a few minor kinks.
Getting and Installing the Program Nero 2014 is available as a download form nero.com as well as in disc format purchasable at your local electronics store. In honor of Nero's history, I decided to go the retro route of installing from a disc. It runs on any version of Windows from XP SP3 to Windows 8.1. Minimum requirements are a 2 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, a DirectX 9 compliant graphics card, and 5GB hard drive space recommended.
When you first run the installer, it asks whether you want to install Nero 2014 or content packs like video effects, themes, and menu templates. I chose the basic suite install. I had to enter the long, long serial number on the disc sleeve, and then agree to a license agreement. I could have the setup create desktop shortcuts and designate it as the default app to open media files. This last was checked by default, which could mess up file associations you've already set up.
An Installation Settings dialog lets you choose which of the suite's seven components (plus help and an auto-updater) you want installed. The process also installs Direct3D 10.1 Extensions, which seems odd on a Windows 8.1 system that comes equipped with DirectX 11.2. Installing took 4:45 minutes on my quad-core 3.4GHz Windows 8.1 system with 8GB DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia Quadro 2000 graphics card. The installed size of the program was a hefty 1.1GB.\u00a0
Interface On first run, a message box asked me to check for updates, which makes sense, since the software could have been updated since the disc was pressed. And the first time you run a suite app, a dialog will ask you to register online, with an email address, name, and location. The startup interface sports that clean, simple look of tiles and bold colors inspired by Windows 8. Tiles for 10 apps appear above a line in the full-screen windows and tiles for ancillary functions like update, tools, tutorials, and product news appear at the bottom. Unlike previous versions, however, you can't customize which software tools get tiles.
As you can see, the tiles are logically arranged in columns for Manage and Play, Edit and Convert, Rip and Burn, and Backup and Rescue. The first column features newer media apps in the suite\u2014MediaHome, MediaBrowser, and Blu-ray Player. Each tile includes an \"i\" button that tells you what it does. I'll discuss each of these in sections below.
MediaHome and MediaBrowser MediaHome is Nero's media manager for all your video, photo, and music files. MediaBrowser is a subset with a smaller window, that, as its name implies, is just for seeing what's in your collection. It's little more than a File Explorer window with the added ability to find content by faces and ratings. The more powerful MediaHome is actually available as a free download from Nero (it was formerly known as KwikMedia), with extra-cost add-ins like the ability to play and burn Blu-ray. From this home, you can open any of the suite's other tools with a selected photo, video, or song.
MediaHome starts off by searching for media files automatically (after your OK). It can optionally search on external and network drives. When I connected a USB drive, a message popped up saying \"You have connected an new device[sic]\" and that I'd have to switch to USB Mass Storage Mode.
The left sidebar in MediaHome lets you select among Photos & Videos, Music, slideshows, and photo products. After the media scan, my photos and videos appeared grouped by dates. You can easily switch between showing just photos, just videos, or both, and a zoom slider resizes the thumbnails. A shuttle control (similar to that in Picasa) let me shuttle up and down among these groups, and helpful dots showed how much content each date contained:
The right panel shows metadata like the time the photo or video was shot, its resolution, location, and rating. I could expand this panel to show EXIF data like shutter speed and exposure settings. I could also apply keyword tags and face tags here. One thing missing here is any geo-tagging capability. Double-clicking a photo's thumbnail opened it to near full window size, and hovering the mouse near the top displays a cool carousel-style navigator to move between other pictures. Another double-click showed the photo truly full-screen, with a black border.
Along the bottom, five buttons let me open a new file, name a person, edit the photo, share it via email, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, or KWICK!\u2014Nero's own online media community. As per usual, you have to go through a Facebook API approval to share to the social network, and I didn't get the choice of which album or privacy setting to use.
\n\nEditing Photos From Nero MediaHome, you can click the Edit Photo button for some basic image correction and enhancements. The editing is non-destructive, meaning you can revert to the original at any time. Keep in mind that this ain't Photoshop, but there's enough for most folks. You get auto-exposure, color, crop, straighten, and red-eye removal. A Brighten slider does what it says, and a \"Backlight\" adjustment seemed just to darken the image\u2014there's no contrast, but there are color temperature and saturation sliders. Eight Instagram-style retro effects round out Nero's photo toolbox, and they're not anywhere as powerful as the Instagram ones, frankly. The \"Frames\" button didn't do anything for me, though the Help says it adds a white border.
Playing Video and Music
MediaHome plays video as well, and I was impressed that it had no trouble playing my 4K (aka Ultra HD) test video from a GoPro Hero III Black Edition[COMMERCE]. The app is also useful for when you plug USB storage: as well as importing the media, it can show you the devices' used and available storage graphically, along with metadata for each individual file.
When it comes to music, MediaHome can display album art, play the songs, and even point you to downloads of more music from the same artist. In a similar way to photo viewing, the app shows info in the right side panel for the selected album or song\u2014rating, play time, artist, genre, and so on.
An interesting option in MediaHome is entered through the button that looks like a TV\u2014media streaming, you can turn this on to stream anything managed by the program to any DLNA-capable device. You can do this with Windows Media player, but MediaHome makes it much easier. MediaHome lets you set streaming quality and see which devices on your home network have access and remove them if you want. This worked easily with an Xbox in our labs, but playback was staggered, and when I set the video to repeat, it still only played once on the Xbox.
Nero Recode Recode is a key selling point for the suite: it's where you select your media and have it automatically reformatted to play on a different device. You can drag-and-drop files onto its large target area at the top of its own program window, or open it from MediaHome. Video is probably the most important content for this treatment, since most smartphones and tablets have no problem displaying photos of any resolution or playing audio.
When I right-clicked on a video in MediaHome and chose \"Convert with Nero Recode\" the app opened with my video on the right, and a list of target devices on the left. These included most popular smartphones and tablets, and consoles\u2014iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxies, and Windows Phone 8 among them. A slider below the target options let me choose quality, from smallest file size to largest.
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