Nero Multimedia Suite 10 Available

The next iteration of the Nero Suite is available for pre-orders at a discount. Nero Multimedia Suite 10 is designed as a bundle of three products, namely Nero Vision Xtra, Nero Burning ROM and Nero BackItUp & Burn. Customers that will pre-order the Suite will be able to take advantage of the special offer set up by Nero, and pay just $79.99, enjoying a $20 instant rebate. According to current general availability plans, Nero Multimedia Suite 10 will hit store shelves worldwide come April 12th, 2010. According to Nero, when it will be offered through the retail channel, the suite will feature a price tag of $99.99.

“During Nero’s fifteen years in business, more than 300 million customers have enjoyed using Nero’s product offerings to manage their content at home, on-the-go and online,” Jürgen Kurz, CEO, Nero AG, said. “Nero Multimedia Suite 10 was developed using extensive market research and incorporating the feedback from over 150,000 consumers and home hobbyists.”

With Nero Vision Xtra, the company is offering customers the marriage of Nero MediaHub and Nero Vision. Specifically, Vision Xtra is designed to act as a multimedia hub, offering customers not just playback, but also management and editing capabilities. AVCHD, MKV, FLV, FLAC, DVD, non-commercial Blu-ray, MPEG-4 AVC, (S)-VCD, AVCREC, audio CDs are among the audio, video and photo formats supported by the tool. Vision Xtra also allows users to publish multimedia projects to CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, but at the same time it hooks into the Cloud and enables sharing across a variety of social-networking communities, such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. In addition, the company boasts a high level of HD performance for Nero Vision, especially for projects involving SmartEncoding for MPEG 2 and AVCHD. Moreover, Vision Xtra comes with NVIDIA CUDA support, a detail designed to allow customers to take advantage of high-performance, hardware-accelerated H.264/AVC encoding.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Nero Suite without the “heart” of the company’s software solutions, namely Nero Burning ROM, which features support for CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. In addition to burning and copying capabilities, Nero Burning ROM now brings to the table SecurDisc 2.0, a technology designed to boost reliability, security and integrity of burned content, and ultimately the lifespan of user-made media. With the latest version of the product, Nero Burning ROM is also capable of burning AVCHD for DVDs and AVCHD / BD-MV for Blu-ray Discs.

“The feedback showed that existing ‘all-in-one’ offerings in the market are considered outdated and work more like Swiss army knives, being the ’jack of all trades and the master of none’. As a result, Nero set out to create a true multimedia suite that offers separate, best-of-breed products dedicated to video creation and management, burning and backup. Nero Multimedia Suite 10 not only meets the needs of today’s customers, it also provides an incredible value,” Kurz added.

The last major piece in the Nero Multimedia Suite 10 bundle available is Nero BackItUp & Burn. The data-protection solution offers, as the label implies, backup and recovery capabilities. According to the company, Nero BackItUp & Burn is capable of safeguarding files even in the eventuality of hard drive crashes, system failures and malware infections. In addition to plain vanilla and automatic backup functionality, Nero BackItUp & Burn can also be leveraged in scenarios in which data needs to be synchronized between computers and mobile devices.

“Tools like Nero Multimedia Suite 10 have the ability to grow the market for photo and video editing,” Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with Parks Associates, added. “Already, the percentage of consumers in U.S. broadband households that self-edit home videos on a regular basis has grown from 10 percent in 2006 to 25 percent in 2009. Today, nearly one-half of consumers are regularly editing photos, up from 35 percent in 2006.”

The components of Nero Multimedia Suite 10 will also be sold as standalone products, namely Nero Vision Xtra ($59.99), Nero Burning ROM ($49.99) and Nero BackItUp & Burn ($39.99). Customers will be able to buy and download either the whole suite or individual components beginning with April 12th. Nero revealed that upgrades to Nero Multimedia Suite 10 started as low as $53.99.

Nero 10 is available for download here.