Ahead releases first beta for Nero Recode 2 - includes MPEG4 encoding

December 5, 2003

The German newssite Chip.de reports that Ahead have released the first beta version of the upcoming software Nero Recode 2. Due to the fact that a final version of Nero Recode 1 was never released, we will probably never see it.

The software is able to copy and do a "9 to 5" conversation for DVDs, compile new DVDs from existing collections or convert them into the new Nero-Digital-Format (MPEG4).

The highlight of this software is Ahead's MPEG4-Video-Codec. Unfortunately it only imports complete DVDs and no single video files yet. So Recode cannot be used as an MPEG4 converter yet.

Fortunately the codec is pretty fast. On a Pentium 4 with 2 GHz the program managed to encode 35 frames per second, in Dual-Pass mode it only needed 2 hours for a 90 minutes film.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any information about this on the Ahead website. The chip-story mentions a picture gallery for Nero Recode 2, but they seem to have a little problem with their site and the link is currently unavailable.

I wonder if there are any standalone players that can play back MPEG4-DVDs.

Source: Chip.de