During this year's CeBIT technology event held in Germany, Ahead announced their plans for a new video codec called Nero Digital. According to the company Nero Digital would be a complete MPEG-4 audio and video compression technology offering excellent video coding algorithms and full High Efficiency AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) in MPEG audio. Nero Digital can compress DVD movies to about 20% of their original size without sacrificing any quality and besides that, Ahead's video codec is able to decode XViD and other MPEG-4 implementations.
As said, Ahead announced Nero Digital during CeBIT which took place in March of this year. Now, roughly nine months later the company has released a beta version of Nero Digital to the press which was later followed by the public release of the software, included in Ahead's Nero Vision Express software, version 2.1.0.3.
Nero Recode 2:
According to the press release we received, Ahead Nero Recode 2 is "both a re-quantizing and transcoding application, and is a world's first in its class. Non-protected DVD-Video discs and DVD folders, including DVD-9 titles, can be re-authored in MPEG-2 by re-processing the MPEG streams. In addition, Nero Recode features the ability to convert DVD titles into Nero Digital, making it possible to fit an entire movie onto a CD."
Some of the Nero Recode 2 features are:
- 5.1 channel Nero Digital Audio support
- Chapter support in Nero Digital
- Subtitles support in Nero Digital
- Burn-at-once during recoding
Today, thanks to Ahead, we are able to show you some screenshots of Nero Recode 2 and we'll also take a look at the Nero Digital codec. The version we're looking at is the public version, 2.0.0.7.
Test Machine:
For the tests we'll be using the following configuration:
Hardware:- Motherboard: GigaByte GA-7VAXP
- Processor: AMD AthlonXP 2100+
- RAM: 512MB (PC2700)
- GFX: ASUS V8200 (GeForce 3 Ti200)
- Hard Disks: DiamondMax 40+30GB (7200rpm)