Nero Digital is a brand name applied to a suite of

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...

-compatible video and audio compression

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or da ...

s developed by

Nero AG Nero AG (known as Ahead Software AG until 2005) is a German computer software company that is especially well known for its CD/DVD/ BD burning suite, ''Nero Burning ROM''. The company's main product is Nero 2019, a piece of software that comp ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

and

Ateme Ateme S.A. is a multinational company that specializes in video delivery, namely software for video compression based on High_Efficiency_Video_Coding, H.265 / High_Efficiency_Video_Coding, HEVC standards; MPEG4; MPEG2 Data_compression#Video, encod ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

. The audio codecs are integrated into the ''Nero Digital Audio+'' audio encoding tool for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, and the audio & video codecs are integrated into Nero's ''Recode''

DVD ripping Ripping is extracting all or parts of digital content from a container. Originally, it meant to rip music out of Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was used to extract WAV or MP3 format files from digital audio CDs, but got applied as well to ...

software. Nero certifies certain DVD player/recorder devices as Nero Digital compatible, and licenses the codec technology to

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

manufacturers. The video codecs were developed by

, and according to an interview with Nero AG developer Ivan Dimkovic, the audio codecs are improved versions of Dimkovic's older ''PsyTEL AAC Encoder''. The audio codec is now available as a free stand-alone package called

Nero AAC Codec __NOTOC__ Nero AAC Codec is a set of software tools for encoding and decoding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format audio, and editing MPEG-4 metadata. It was developed and distributed by Nero AG, and is available at no cost for Windows and Linux f ...

Functionality

Nero Digital can generate streams in the 3GP/

MPEG-4 Part 14 MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows stream ...

() container format and includes two video and two audio codecs: * ASP (one of about 20 profiles defined in MPEG-4 Part 2) * AVC (also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or H.264) *

AAC-LC Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stand ...

(the most widely used AAC profile defined in

MPEG-4 Part 3 MPEG-4 Part 3 or MPEG-4 Audio (formally ISO/IEC 14496-3) is the third part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 international standard developed by Moving Picture Experts Group. It specifies audio coding methods. The first version of ISO/IEC 14496-3 was publish ...

) * HE-AAC (defined in MPEG-4 Part 3, sometimes referenced as "aacPlus" or other, similar trademarks) The codecs are compliant with the

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...

standard, with the exception of subtitles and chapter information. The video streams generated by Nero Digital can be played back on some stand-alone hardware players and software media players such as the company's own Nero Showtime. Recode cannot rip encrypted DVD movie discs, but is able to import decrypted DVD images for encoding. Nero Digital also does not ship its codecs as stand-alone

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

VfW The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), formally the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, is an organization of US war veterans, who, as military service members fought in wars, campaigns, and expeditions on foreign land, waters, or ...

modules, preventing them from being used for general-purpose video editing. The product is not bundled with a video editor.

Comparisons with other video codecs (2003-2005)

The Nero Digital video codecs have been featured in video compression comparisons: * In th
2003 Doom9 codec comparison
the ASP codec was the fastest of all the codecs, but fared relatively poorly in quality. * The Nero Digital AVC codec was pronounced the winner of th

ND ASP did not compete. * In th

the ASP codec was still the fastest and fared better than previously in quality, but not well enough to make it to the finals. The AVC codec came in second overall. * In May 2005, it won th
C't magazine video codec quality comparison
competing against other AVC codecs such as

x264 x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. History ...

, VideoSoft's codec, the

MainConcept MainConcept GmbH is a software company founded in Germany by Markus Moenig and Thomas Zabel. They specialize in developing video/audio codecs and also applications and plug-ins related to video/audio encoding. They are a subsidiary of Endeavor ...

codec and the

Sorenson codec Sorenson Media was an American software company specializing in video encoding technology. Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which was licensed and ultimately acquired from Utah State University. T ...

. * Nero Digital AVC also won an informal 2005
Movie Metric Benchmark challenge
' with up to a 1dB quality gain over DivX at the same bitrate.

References

External links

Nero AAC Codec

Nero AAC Information
at Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase {{Compression software implementations, state=collapsed Video codecs Audio codecs

Functionality

Comparisons with other video codecs (2003-2005)

See also

References

External links