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 ...
-compatible video and audio compression
codec
A codec is a computer hardware or software component 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 o ...
s developed by
Nero AG of
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
and
Ateme of
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
. The audio codecs are integrated into the ''Nero Digital Audio+'' audio encoding tool for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
, and the audio & video codecs are integrated into Nero's ''Recode''
DVD ripping software.
Nero certifies certain DVD player/recorder devices as Nero Digital compatible, and licenses the codec technology to
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
manufacturers.
The video codecs were developed by
Ateme, 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.
Functionality
Nero Digital can generate streams in the
3GP/
MPEG-4 Part 14
MP4 (formally MPEG-4 Part 14), 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 ...
() 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 (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 publis ...
)
*
HE-AAC (defined in MPEG-4 Part 3, sometimes referenced as "aacPlus" or other, similar trademarks)
The codecs are compliant with the
ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
Me ...
/
IEC 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 ...
or
VfW 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, VideoSoft's codec, the
MainConcept codec and the
Sorenson codec.
* Nero Digital AVC also won an informal 2005
Movie Metric Benchmark challenge' with up to a 1dB quality gain over
DivX
DIVX (Digital Video Express) is a discontinued digital video format. Created in part by Circuit City, it was an unsuccessful attempt to create an alternative to video rental in the United States. The format's poor reception from consumers resu ...
at the same bitrate.
See also
*
List of multimedia codecs
References
External links
Nero AAC CodecNero AAC Informationat Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
{{Compression software implementations, state=collapsed
Video codecs
Audio codecs