BURNING TO DISC

nero-burning-romWe burn CDs and DVDs using Windows.  But that isn’t always the best way to do it, as Joy found out when she tried to do a DVD presentation to her P.E.O. woman’s group. Her DVD didn’t play on their player. The new “Burning ROM” program from Nero helps ensure your CD or DVD will work with any player.  The other important thing is the blank discs you use. Don’t buy the cheapest DVDs for something important. Our contact at Nero recommended Taiyo Yuden and Ritek, two brands we had barely ever heard of.

Nero’s “Burning ROM” (a cute word play on the Emperor Nero’s burning of Rome) lets you copy across discs. If you start out burning data to a DVD and run out of room on the disc, you can continue with other discs. The program lets you switch to CDs, and switch again if you run out of those. (Nero says they have the only program that allows a mixture of different media for one disc burning job.)

If the content you are burning to disc doesn’t fill it up, the program will then duplicate the content across every remaining empty track. This means that if the disc gets scratched and unreadable in one place, the laser reader can usually pick up the content from a track further on.  An “auto-run” feature is included, so when you give the disc to someone, it starts right up.

Burning ROM allows you to encrypt the files you burn to disc and add what’s called a “digital signature.” If someone changes the content and burns it to a new disc, the lack of that signature will prove that it did not come from the original author. This can be important in some business situations.

You’ll probably need to read the help files to do half of the stuff in this program, such as editing your music, or choosing the right kind of format for your video. We just left the default settings in place and were OK.

Burning ROM is $50 from nero.com. You can try it out if you download the free trial version of the $80 three-product “Multimedia 10” suite at Nero.com; this set includes Burning ROM.

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