Nero Multimedia Suite 10

Initially Nero Burning ROM only offered optical disc authoring capabilities but over the years the application has evolved into a fully-fledged authoring suite. Version 6 was the first time Nero Burning ROM was offered as part of a larger suite and now with version 10, the suite has gained an even greater breath of capabilities.

One new addition to the already very capable authoring suite is the ‘MediaHub'. This particular application is designed to help you organise your media, modify photographs and includes a dedicated media player and slideshow creation utility. Comparing MediaHub to the rest of the suite the application's slick interface immediately jumps at you; it holds a definite edge over most of the suites' other utilities with the exception of the ‘Only BackItUp and Burn'.

Broad file format support is one of MediaHub's greatest assets. The application is compatible with codecs such as MP4, HD WMV, MKV, FLV in addition to more common formats such as JPEG, MPEG, MP3, Audio CD as well as various others.
The photo editor is a useful tool as well and while it's no replacement for a fully-fledged photo editing application - like Adobe's Photoshop - it offers most of the commonly used photo editing tools. You can for instance add a few special effects, tweak colours and brightness and even correct minor flaws on photos.

The disc authoring application - Nero Burning ROM - has also received upgrades; perhaps the most useful is its disc spanning ability for data discs. This very useful feature allows you to split data across multiple optical discs and the best part is that you can mix media; if you wanted to you could start with a Blu-ray disc, use a DVD for the second disc and then use a CD for the third. Burning ROM even burns a small application to the last disc so you can recombine and recover the data on another machine that doesn't have the suite installed. Brilliant.

Nero Vision 10 has also received a fair few useful upgrades. The biggest in our book is the inclusion of support for nVidia's CUDA hardware AVC/.264 acceleration. So should your machine have a CUDA compatible GPU you can enjoy smooth video playback even if your machine lacks a fast processor. You can also now work on Blu-ray content
without spending extra cash on a separate Blu-ray update.

One major issue with Nero Multimedia Suite 10 is that it, on occasion, brought our machine to its knees. We tested the suite on a PC equipped with a 2.66GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB of memory and a 7200rpm hard drive and every so often the machine would become totally unresponsive for a
few seconds. Needless to say this is quite annoying.