Before doing anything else, I would like to start off with an introduction to Nero Home.

Nero Home: For the first time, Nero AG gives us Nero Home. According to Nero, Nero Home is a new and innovative media manager that provides fast access to the user’s entire digital media library with remote control. From the comfort of the user’s own living room, digital media can be viewed on a plasma, LCD or CRT TV. Nero Home integrates TV time-shifting and DVD, music and video playback. It has a simplified interface and a TV wizard to walk users through a simple setup.

Nero Home, the complete multimedia solution

Nero Home features are:

• Quick & easy access to all your digital media files from the comfort of your living room using a remote control
• Integrates TV time-shifting, DVD, video, photo and audio playback
• Easy wizard setup and user interface
• Support for all popular media formats
• Powerful database for storing and organizing of media files into playlists
• Advanced search options
• Complete multiple tasks concurrently
• Text input using a virtual keyboard 
• On Screen Display
• 3D Visualizations

• ATI Remote Wonder I
• ATI Remote Wonder II
• ATI Remote Wonder Plus
• Windows Media Center 2004
• Windows Media Center 2005
• Hauppauge New Remote

I found Nero Home a little heavy and as a result, for a low-end PC, it may not be the best solution for multimedia experience. The interface is user friendly and with one click, you can gather together all the multimedia files from your computer. With many operations a wizard appears to help you out. The 3D visualizations are quite impressive and you can run more than one task at a time (e.g. you can set up a photo slide show to run in a small window on the left corner while at the same time listen to your music with its display in the central window). 

Before analyzing the audio, photo and data features, we need to take a look at Nero Scout.

Nero Scout: Just like other media solutions, Nero has added Nero Scout for organizing media files. It is a new, unique media database that provides instant access to the user's media files from any Nero application, Windows Explorer and many standard Windows applications. The advantage of Nero Scout is that it can be used from Windows Explorer or from any of the other Nero applications.

Nero Scout is a new media database

Extended support for Nero Scout is available in the following Nero applications:

• Nero PhotoSnap
• Nero Burning ROM 7
• Nero Express 7
• Nero Vision
• Nero SoundTrax 2
• Nero WaveEditor 3

This helps you keep your media files organized with only a few clicks. You don't have to use a lot of different databases, only Nero Scout. A necessary move and we are very happy to see that this method has been finally implemented.