Major Enhancements To Nero Announced
March 22, 2004
Karlsbad, Germany - Ahead Software has announced an upgrade to Nero Digital, adding AVC (Advanced Video Coding/H264) and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) to the product's MPEG-4 audio and video compression technology. Also announced is a major upgrade to its CD and DVD recordable application, InCD.
InCD 4.2 has been engineered to include support for DRT-DM, bringing compatibility with DVD-RW, DVD+MRW writing to DVD+RW, and packet-writing implementation of UDF 2.5.
InCD is a true drive letter drag and drop CD/DVD recording utility. Using Windows Explorer, or the desktop, files can be saved directly to a CDRW or DVD/RW drive in the same way as a floppy disk. Likewise in open application such as word processing or spreadsheets, accessing the Save or Save As commands, will give the option to save directly to CDRW or DVD/RW, without ever having to open a separate recording application.
Nero Digital Video will also be significantly enhanced with the addition of AVC/H264, the manufacturer describes. In recent proven tests by the MPEG Organisation, MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding significantly outperformed the coding efficiency of previous standards including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Simple and Advanced Profile. Achieving bit rates of up to four times greater in terms of equivalent perceptual video quality is seen as a major step towards AVC becoming the next generation video standard.
Parametric Audio Coding contains a highly efficient tool to code the stereo image enabling Parametric Stereo AAC to be combined in a backwards compatible fashion with High Efficiency AAC for usage in the low bit-rate range. This can offer an increase of up to 33% in coding gain over HE-AAC permitting very high quality audio compression at the lowest bit rates.
Ahead AAC developers have created special optimizations to the existing Nero Digital HE AAC core codec that includes down sampled HE AAC mode that will provide higher quality playback for devices not supporting HE AAC but supporting LC AAC. Likewise for devices that have HE AAC integration, there will be a big improvement in the overall quality of playback.
For the first time, bit rates as low as 24kbps will be realised at a quality level surpassing HE AAC at 32kbps in many cases. Therefore in the future, using Nero applications such as Recode, full high quality transcoding to Parametric Audio Coding will be possible at the lowest of bit rates.
Many of the Ahead Software applications are only available with the Nero 6 Ultra Edition retail package, priced at $99.00 USD.
For complete product information, visit
www.nero.com
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