Guides

One of the biggest developments in video over the last few years is the development of MPEG-4 video. For several years, until the availablity of low cost DVD burners and media, DivX, an implementation of the MPEG-4 ASP standard, was the preferred way to make high quality DVD backups. Unfortunately these would only play on a computer, and as DVD burning became affordable for the masses, MPEG-4 encoding became less interesting for the masses.

Since then, MPEG-4 ASP support has become a somewhat common, although not standard, feature for standalone DVD players. MPEG-4 technology has improved as well with the maturation of the open source XviD codec and an entire standard called H.264. H.264, also known as Advanced Video Coding or AVC, is a more advanced standard than MPEG-4 ASP. While the original MPEG-4 development was intended to lower bandwidth requirements for video without reducing quality significantly, AVC is designed to be a replacement for technologies used in standalone devices like DVD players. In fact, along with MPEG-2 and VC-1, it's one of the core technologies behind Blu-Ray and HD DVD. The continuing growth of digital television and HTPCs (Home Theater PCs) has provided even more uses for this standard.

This guide will walk you through encoding files to Nero Digital using Nero Vision 4, available with Nero 7 Ultra Edition. The final result will be an MP4 file. Despite the popularity of the AVI
format, MP4 is the only official container format for MPEG-4 of any kind. Besides files produced by Nero, I also use the MP4 container for XviD encodes. If you have problems playing back MP4 files you can either use Nero Showtime or follow the instructions in Afterdawn's MP4 playback guide.

Required Software:

Nero 7

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. About Nero Digital
3. Running Nero Vision
4. Encoding