Nero Digital paves the way for HD burning with kick-ass sound
Nero Digital
The product: Most of us don't have HD-DVD players yet, but we will. And when high-def players take over, we'll want to make sure that our home movies and non-copy-protected movies look and sound as good as they can on those players. That's where Nero Digital comes in. A new codec (short for compressor-decompressor) doesn't seem hot, but this new technology, added to Nero's burning and compression software (called Recode), will let you create full MPEG-4 content that will play in the DVD players and on the portable media devices of the future. The Nero Digital codec opens some additional doors, too:

• Lets you make movies with integrated 5.1 and surround sound.
• With Nero's burning software, lets you choose a profile?-Portable, Mobile, Standard, Cinema, or HDTV?-to work best with your playback device and create content that will look its best on a player you may not buy for another year or two.
• Lets you listen to high-quality audio that fits your HD video?-unlike the DivX codec, which relegates audio to MP3 format.

The prospects: If we're to believe what Nero tell us, the future looks bright. Nero predicts widespread Nero Digital compatibility in consumer DVD players by fall 2005. And as cell phones and mobile devices become more and more video friendly, this compression technology could be equipped to produce slick and svelte video and sound for them, too.

By Lindsey Turrentine, section editor, CNET Reviews