Using Nero 7 to Burn HD

Nero is known for releasing multiple incremental updates to its software in between releases of full-fledged versions, and a newly added feature to Nero 7 (a free upgrade to owners of the suite via Nero’s website), should be of particular interest to HD video camera owners.

With the update, you can use Nero Vision 4—one of the suite’s video apps—to burn high-definition content to a standard DVD. This is welcome alternative if you want to author high-def home movies that don’t require the full 25GB of expensive Blu-ray media. I say Blu-ray media because the DVD you create with Vision is only playable in a Blu-ray player, including Sony’s PS3. Still, it’s a nifty trick.

The secret lies in AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition), which uses an MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video codec, and which when combined with audio in an MPEG-4 Transport Stream can be played without modification in a Blu-ray player. I experimented by burning a 4GB MPEG-2 HDV file to a DVD, and the results were impressive. The 17 minute high-definition video played from the disc without any glitches in both a stand-alone Blu-ray drive and a PS3, as promised. And the quality looked just as good as with the original.

HD DVD loyalists aren’t necessarily out in the cold. Corel’s new media-creation suite will offer a similar feature for those folks. And Pinnacle and Ulead are also joining the HD-to-DVD party. So everyone wins.