Nero Ninja The Mushaves tricks

There’s nothing easier than popping a blank disk into a drive and burning data on it using Nero. But beneath the surface of this application lies a wealth of cool tricks!

This much is undisputed—when it comes to CD and DVD burning, Nero is the sensei among other applications in its class. Over the years, it has grown to encompass a huge variety of applications and capabilities and in its current version, it allows you to do a lot more than just burn data on disks—there’s support for the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards, the ability to edit and author audio and video compilations, and even manage multimedia files scattered all across your home or office network. Perhaps it should stop being called just a DVD-burning application!

However, you may have noticed that there are several occasions where you would have expected Nero to burn your CD or DVD, only to find that the task does not complete correctly, or the disk is unreadable after the burn. This could happen even when you use new ‘branded’ media. Over the next few pages, you will find solutions to all of these niggling annoyances. To start, many of Nero’s problems can be alleviated by configuring it the right way after installing the program. Once this is addressed, you will be able to repeatedly create error-free disks, run tests to find out how reliable your new stack of blank DVDs are, and even pack more data than is advertised on your disks—all reliably!

Configuring for Nero: Activate the Ultra DMA mode
Even though I know I have a fast drive and fast media, Nero burns disks a snail’s pace. Why does this happen?


Solution: This can be attributed to a little setting associated with the way your DVD- or CD-Writer is connected to your system—it is called the DMA mode. This is a speedy mode of data transfer in which the drive directly communicates with your computer’s RAM. If this mode is disabled, your system will default to a much slower mode called PIO. This mode is too slow to support the quick burning speeds supported by today’s DVD-Writer drives. It is possible that this setting gets changed by the system after consecutively burning bad quality media, or via other programs like disk imagers that use their own drivers. Either way, you have to make sure your drive is running in Ultra DMA mode—here’s how it is done.

Open the Device Manager and navigate to the ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers’ section in the device listing. Expand this and double-click on the Primary IDE Channel. In the Advanced Settings tab, ensure that the selection in the Transfer Mode box is set to ‘DMA if available’. Change this setting if it indicates ‘PIO Only’. Do the same for both, Device 0 and Device 1. Hit OK and repeat these steps for the Secondary IDE channel. Of course, you could directly set this value if you knew which channel your DVD-Writer was attached to, but there’s no harm in enabling Ultra DMA mode for all channels as virtually every hard disk and DVD-Writer supports this mode these days. You would need to restart your computer, after which you should experience significantly quicker burns.

Identify sub-standard blank disks
Even though you have always been buying reasonably-priced blank CD and DVD media of a particular brand, Nero has started burning them at a slower speed.


Solution: Every so often, the speed advertised on a DVD media package differs from the capability of the disks inside. There are some distributors who even buy disks and switch them between products. Some of the more notorious examples include disks from brands like Princo and Memorex—you might come across these media even if you bought a spindle of Sony writeable disks.

You can use an interesting capability of Nero, where it can identify the characteristics of a blank CD or DVD, including the manufacturer’s name and the batch. This gives good insight into the quality of the media.

To do this, insert a blank DVD in the drive and open ‘Tools | Nero CD-DVD Speed’ found in the start menu of Nero. Here, select your drive in the pop-up menu and the tool starts reading the blank disk. Under the ‘Disk Info’ tab, you will find an entry called ‘MID’ (Manufacturer Identity). If this MID entry consists of zeroes, it indicates a production defect that is usually associated with cheap imitation disks. The result: Nero will still attempt to burn the disk at a lowered speed, since the program is unable to determine the burning speed as indicated by manufacturers on every blank disk they create. When you locate the MID, you can determine its pedigree by heading over to the website www.digitalfaq.com/media /dvdmedia.htm. Here, blank disks from several manufacturers are divided into four classes with the best being Class 1 and the worst being Class 4. As a rule of thumb, avoid using Class 3 and 4 media.

Flawless extraction of audio CD tracks
Is Nero truly the best choice for extracting audio from my favorite CDs?


Solution: A tool called ‘Nero CD-DVD Speed’ can evaluate how effectively your CD or DVD burner can copy Audio CDs on your hard disk without any errors. Insert an audio CD into your drive and launch this tool. Go to ‘Run Test’ and select ‘DAE quality’. While running this test, the application extracts sections from the Audio CD and compares these sections with original audio. It then returns a value between 0 and 10 in the ‘DAE quality’ field. You can blindly use Nero to copy audio CDs to your hard disk if you see the value ‘10’, and especially if Nero CD-DVD Speed activates the checkbox ‘Accurate stream’. If not, we recommend using other specialized tools such as Exact Audio Copy to copy audio, as these verify the read audio stream to ensure accuracy.

Stuff a blank disk to its brim
When you burn a CD or DVD, it recognizes the disk’s recommended capacity. Is there any way this can be exceeded safely, to pack in more data?

Solution: Blank media manufacturers always leave a bit of extra room on their writeable CDs and DVDs—this is like a safety margin so that the advertised capacity can be relieably written in accordance with CD or DVD standards. However, if you know how to you can instruct Nero to exceed a media’s given capacity and squeeze in some extra data into each burn. This is known as overburning and the amount of overburning varies between brands of blank CD and DVD media. But know that there are risks invoved—in the worst case, setting the Overburn value in Nero to the maximum can even damage your DVD burner. Therefore, it is recommended to first measure the safe overburn value with Nero CD-DVD Speed in advance, before regularly overburning your disks. Here’s how you do it:

First insert a blank disk, start the program and open the ‘Overburning test’ under ‘Tools’. This tool attempts to safely pack in as much data as it can on your CD or DVD. At the end, it gives you the time that you can overburn the blank disk in minutes and seconds (time relates to the amount of extra Audio CD information you can pack in). For example, you could expect around 2:30 minutes on a normal 700 MB CD-R. This translates to about 15 MB of data storage.

You will now need to enter this value in Nero. Open the program and go to the ‘Expert Features’ via ‘File | Options’. Activate the checkbox for ‘Activate Disk-at-once CD overburning’. Click on ‘Relative maximum overburning size’ and enter the determined value in its field—in this case, enter a value of ‘2:30’. Activate the checkbox ‘Enable generation of short lead-out’ to exhaust the capacity of the blank disk. Both entries together would give you about 15 MB of additional storage on a 700 MB blank disk when you burn in the Disk-at-once mode. Remember to use the same brand of blank DVD for all subsequent burning projects. If you change the brand of your blank media, it is recommended that you run this exercise again to ascertain its overburn capability.

Copy films without compromising on its quality
The Nero Recode tool has converted one of my films from a DVD9 format (dual layer) to a DVD5 format (single layer). But Nero now claims that it is not compatible with the DVD5 standard.

Solution: Sometimes DVD copiers such as Recode compute the characteristics of the DVD video incorrectly, resulting in a file that is about 100 MB more than the rated capacity of a DVD5 disk. This causes problems when you try and copy this movie file onto a blank disk as its capacity will be exceeded. You can rectify this without further lowering the movie quality which would anyway be reduced due to the recoding.

Start Recode and select ‘Recode Main Movie to DVD’. Re-import the converted video with the ‘Compile a DVD’ option from Recode’s main menu. Select the imported file and hit the ‘Trim movie’ button—do this by setting the second-last chapter as end point in the right window. As a rule, the last DVD chapter consists of the movie’s end credits—by eliminating this, you will gain around 100 to 150 MB of space. You can check whether this is sufficient by clicking on ‘OK’ in Recode’s main window: the slider for ‘Video quality’ should now indicate ‘100%’.

This trick does not work directly in Recode if you have created the copy with a DVD menu. The ‘Compress movie’ option will be missing under ‘Recode DVDs and videos to Nero Digital’. Try out the following if you want to retain the DVD menus: simply copy the menu and control files of the original copy to the folder of the second. This includes all files except the main movie file. Check whether the DVD compilation functions in a DVD player such as Nero Showtime before you burn it.

A hidden setting for ultimate video quality
You plan to copy a very long film to DVD5 using Recode. In doing so, you do not want to compromise on the image quality at all. What can I do besides the standard Nero video configuration settings?

Solution: There are registry entries for four different video quality levels that are hidden from direct access via Recode. However, you can tap into these through the registry. First launch the Registry Editor using ‘Run | Regedit’. Navigate your way to the ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAheadRecodePreferences’ directory. You will find the entry ‘CompressMode’ here. With a double-click, you can assign a value between ‘0’ and ‘3’ to it. 0 represents ‘maximum sharpness’ (sharp video quality) and 3 represents ‘maximum smoothness’ (fuzzy video quality). Select the value ‘3’ for films over 150 minutes in duration and for old film material, as this setting reduces artifacts and blockiness. In normal cases (films with a running time of under two hours), Recode achieves best results with this value set to ‘0’. If you have not yet copied anything using Recode, this entry will not exist in the registry. You will therefore need to create it yourself—after navigating to the above location, click ‘New | DWORD value’ and name it ‘CompressMode’. Assign the desired compression mode by double-clicking on it and typing in the appropriate value.

Enabling this functionality is now simpler with a program called the Recode AEC Changer (Adaptive Error Compensation) tool, which has been created by an enthusiast. You will find it in the following forum: Digital Forum. This tool provides easy access to modifying the registry entries described above. However, many virus scanners may wrongly report this as a virus when you call up the tool. You can ignore this.