Nero Digital video codec

Now that we’ve set-up our movie we can start the encoding process. After pressing the next button we can see the burn window which offers us some more options. First of all we can set the burn options. We can burn our encoded movie straight to CD or DVD or we can simply copy it to a folder on our hard disk. Besides the burn option we have another option called “Nero Digital Settings“. This option allows us to tweak the Nero Digital codec.

We can choose from fast encoding (one pass) and high quality encoding (two passes). But when we select the expert mode option we get complete control over the Nero Digital codec. Here we can find the following settings:

• Codec thread priority which ranges from idle to time critical
• Encoding method:
  • fast (one pass) and high quality (two passes)
  • minimum and maximum quantizer
• Quality/Speed:
  • performance/quality ranging from fastest encoding to best quality
  • motion search
  • NC prediction
  • scene cut
  • fast ME
  • low noise and high noise
  • high BVOP quantisation
  • maximum RV range
  • psycho-visual quality level
• Advanced:
  • simple profile (QuickTime compatibility)
  • MPEG or H263 quantisation
  • spatial prediction
  • predicted VOP
  • unrestricted motion vectors
  • 4 motions vectors per macroblock
  • bidirectional VOP
  • support of interlaced VOP
  • global motion compensation
• Keyframes:
  • mimimum and maximum keyframe interval
• Matrices:
  • intra and inter matrices

As you can see from these option the expert mode is only intended for experienced users. Because most users will most likely keep the original settings we didn’t use the expert mode and let Nero Recode 2 control all the settings. We used the best quality mode which uses two passes. The encoding process took around two hours on our test machine (1.74GHz Athlon XP with 512MB RAM). When the encoding process was complete we got one 680MB .MP4 file on our hard disk. The file could, of course, be played with Nero’s ShowTime player:

When we played the created file with Nero ShowTime we were actually very surprised with the produced quality. When you think of the fact that the original DVD movie was over 7GB in size and the created .MP4 file is less than 700MB you would expect the movie quality to be very poor. This was not the case! Below we’ve taken some screenshots in which you can see that the picture is of very decent quality. The quality was not as good as the original DVD but as said, when you compress a movie to 10% of its original size you’re bound to sacrifice some quality.

Another great thing about the .MP4 file is that it contains a chapter index and subtitles are also added to the stream. Via Nero ShowTime we can easily select which scene we want to skip to and if we want to display subtitles or not:

This review of the Nero Recode software and the Nero Digital codec would of course not be complete if we didn’t compare the codec to some of its most important competitors, namely DivX and XViD. Continue reading on the next page to find out more!