So far seems good overall. First issue encountered is with 2018 BackItUp. While there are some good functionality features, there is a very unfortunate limitation to 260 characters for the file path length. Windows 10 provides an option to remove this limitation, but Nero appears to have the limitation built in to its software. This will force me to stop using Nero BackItUp and rely on other software that does not have this limitation.

Easy to navigate. Never used nero before. Got it to sort through media files and to mess around with my music. Happy with purchase.

Nero Express is real good for photos to but on Blu-ray 50GB and 100GB. but not real good with to burn files word documents data on Blu-ray 50GB and 100GB today 25GB got (Not Responding) "Generotion of disc structures started", "Unexpected exception", "out of memory" and "Generation of disc structures failed" on my combuter Windows 10 64 bit only cost disc after started burn and Nero Express stop running before 100% finish.

I am a loyal customer since Nero 5.5. Nero 6 was a peak and I have to admit I had the feeling things are going down-hill with Nero. Nero 7,8,9 where OK, but also had it's issues. However in recent years I got more and more excited with every release. It looks to me that Nero started to actively listen to it's customers and implements stuff we really need to get the job done, instead of playing catch up with competitors that put so many meaningless features in their software just to be able to write the latest buzz word on their box.

I am on Windows 10, 64 Bit and I am using a 1080GTX. Hardware acceleration works like a charm in Nero Video and Nero Recode (I use it for preview only). I like the new movie themes and the vertical video editing. The new Nero DuplicateManager is also nice and saved me 3GB on my 256 SSD. However there is room for improvement: At the moment it only detects exact duplicates but I would like to see this evolve in something that can also detect similar images. Maybe Nero 2019 will do this job, too. Looking forward. Keep up the good work Nero.

It's been a while, so there is a lot to write about. As usual, Nero gave me a test copy so I could provide feedback, as well as writing this review, but they haven't compensated me otherwise.

TL;DR "“ The network media streaming capabilities of this release of Nero establish the title as a solid contender in that space. While it has a few shortcomings vs. the established players, it's gone from "something that kinda sorta works" to "a solid entry that will work for many". Video's addition of vertical video handling gives users multiple options of addressing cell phone video, and the title continues to improve overall. Other modules and applications collectively provide iterative improvements, though BackItUp has some notable shortcomings. While areas of improvement still exist, this is the year, at long last, a Nero release gets a 5-star review rating.

I won't spend much time on the installer. The process took about four minutes on my laptop; another computer I ran it on with a Core i3, 4GB RAM, and a spinning hard disk clocked in at a little under 7 minutes "“ still not bad for a suite of this size. As usual, be careful during the install if you don't want your file associations changed.
I also won't spend much time on the new start screen"¦except to say that it looks pretty and is an improvement over last year. Also, was really cool to select a bunch of images in a folder, click "create slide show/movie", and have Nero Video open with a prepopulated project *and* timeline with the photos laid out sequentially.

Mediahome has gotten no shortage of criticism over the years from me, in no small part because it seemed to have both questionable utility and a long standing problem that "personal media" and "not-personal media" were invariably shown side-by-side, as only the date mattered. In this release, they've solved that problem. Upon selection of folders for import, you'll have the opportunity to categorize their contents, whether the folders contain music, photos, or video. The video category is further divided up by "˜TV Shows', "˜Movies', or "˜My Videos'. Movie and TV show titles and cover art are all pulled from the internet automatically, and filed sequentially. For real, they have this right and I couldn't be happier. One thing I will note is that it uses the last appearance of the "S00E00" format to determine the season and episode; if you have a pattern similar to that at the end of a file, that takes precedence, at least at the time of this writing. There's an article in the KnowHow app that goes into greater detail about it if you run into trouble, but barring a handful of exceptions, Mediahome picked up my Plex-compliant file names perfectly.
All of this is particularly wonderful because Nero's Streaming Player finally works the way a streaming app should "“ it autodetects the server on the network, shows the different categories, and it's tap-and-play. This whole thing working as well as it does has made it clear that Nero is looking to enter a space dominated by Plex, and if they keep the rate they're going, they'll be there soon. However, the streaming functions are not without their own "personality".
Mediahome is the streaming server as well, and it runs on startup as a service if you want. Users hosting their streaming libraries on Windows will be set, but Linux and BSD are nonstarters here; this is a Windows-only show. Moreover, the MediaHome server software is a part of Nero itself; if you have a dedicated media/storage server that's different than the computer you use for video editing or disc creation, you'll either be mapping network shares or you'll need a second Nero license for your server (though the mobile apps are all free). While my last several attempts to use this setup have worked great, earlier iterations had been a bit less consistent in their ability to connect clients to servers. The last release has taken great strides in this arena, so if you find yourself having a bit of trouble, the help files are pretty well written for the common issues and the "˜force scan' button added to the most recent update helped as well. Also, to be fair, I've had similar issues with Plex from time to time. Also note that very large libraries may see a bit of lag; I filled a category with >600 music videos for testing, and it ran a bit sluggish, especially during the indexing. Streaming is also a bit CPU intensive; my high end i7 laptop saw its cooling fans kick it up a notch while watching streaming a video to my phone. MediaHome doesn't explicitly have a means to stream video over the internet if you're not keen on doing some port forwarding. The mobile app also isn't the greatest when it comes to extended periods of time between "pausing a video" and "starting it again". Basically, every time the screen shut off, I was returning to the beginning of what I was watching. Finally, the Streaming Media Player is available for iOS and Android at the moment"¦and nothing else. It does standard DLNA streaming though, and thus most smart TVs and set-top boxes which support that standard can still access the server that way, which I've done successfully. I asked the developers about a first party streaming player app for Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, and others, because that's kind of important in this context. I am allowed to say the following: "When talking to developers, between the lines it sounded like there may be chances that we will see a Nero Streaming Player App for Chromecast, and the like at some point."
Ultimately, if you've got an extensive Plex library with multiple users, shares with friends, and configured on an Ubuntu box"¦it's going to be a bit of an uphill battle to switch. If, however, your goal is to be able to utilize your TV to video photos and self-produced videos for your next holiday gathering, Mediahome does a solid job of simplifying the flow from import, to edit, to export, to display, without requiring any additional software.

The next highlighted-on-the-box feature that's a newcomer this release is the Photo Deduplicator, a new module that, unsurprisingly, deduplicates photos. It took about an hour to scan through my 250GB photo library (admittedly living on an SSD) and found 40GB of redundant photos. Its interface allowed me to easily decide which photos to keep and which ones to discard, as well as showing thumbnails of both so I could be confident it found the same photo. Each found duplicate has an option to decide which one to keep, as well as batch selection modes to minimize the amount of clicking for larger groups. It works, it's simple, it's clear, and it even has options to put the duplicates in a separate location if you're a bit trigger shy on the delete button.
I'm torn, however, because I feel that it lacks the kind of functionality I would expect for a module being prominently advertised as a part of a software suite of Nero's caliber at this stage in the game. It will find identical files, and I mean *identical* files. It will look past filenames for similarities, but that's about it. Is the picture resized or format-converted? It isn't considered a duplicate then. While I'm not expecting the levels of image analysis that Google Photos has implemented, I'm of the persuasion that JPEG copies of RAW files (or vice versa) in the same folder should be considered duplicates, at least optionally. Would I recommend rushing out and buying Nero Platinum 2018 just for this module? No; download DupeGuru. Would I recommend letting this application go through your photo library and weeding out the duplicates it does find? Without question.

Nero Video has been one of the focus points of the suite for the past several years, and it really is a solid contender for a consumer/prosumer video editing application. I'll get to the things it does in a minute, but the first thing I want to stress is something I'm really happy it *doesn't* do. I managed to get a copy of CyberLink Media Suite 14 Ultimate in a flash sale at some point. Now, I thought that getting the "Ultimate" version meant that there was nothing more to buy, because that tends to be what "Ultimate" means. Not so much. Half the video effect plugins that shipped with the software are *still* paid addons, and there was nowhere in the software to disable the upgrade notices "“ I had to use write permissions at a file system level to disable those "upgrade to the latest version" notifications, even though my purchase was less than two months ago. Nero doesn't do this. I get notifications when there are product updates, but there is a "don't show again" box and I can check it manually and never get another notification. I have the Platinum edition of the software, and there is nothing more to purchase, period. Every effect works, every DVD menu works, and every addon in Mediahome works. Done. If you're tired of feeling like your video editing application is panhandling every time you load it, Nero Video has got you covered. Okay, rant over.
The big deal last year was 4K editing. Sorry I missed the review last year, but I found some 4K footage to run some tests on. Though admittedly I had several stacked clips, each sporting multiple video effects and speed variances and other sorts of software-testing functions implemented, it brought my Core i7 with 16GB of RAM, a RAID0 of SSDs and an nVidia GTX 960 to its knees. If you're editing 4K, you'll need both a good set of specs and patience when you do your final render, especially if you use any sort of "˜blur' effect. That being said, when the output finally does finish rendering, it looks great, and the process of editing 4K is exactly the same as anything else you've edited"¦just bigger. Now, let's discuss this year's big entry: Vertical Video Support. There are two kinds of people in this world: The kinds of people who know that the only acceptable place for vertical video is Snapchat or Instagram, and the kinds of people who upload vertical videos to Youtube. I have strong feelings on the matter, but Nero Video put lots of smart people in a room and figured out how to address this situation for both camps. They have two ways of dealing with vertical video: the Vertical Video project, and the "Remove Black Bars" effect.
The Vertical Video project retains the 9:16 ratio of most vertical videos as a function of the project. The preview window assumes that orientation, and clips on a timeline are treated normally, with the output being a video of that same orientation. All of the effects and such work exactly the same. Horizontal videos added to a vertical project get black bars on the top and bottom, though resizing handles make it possible to retain proportion while zooming in, and the clip is snapped to the center to provide further assistance when performing this task. If vertical video is your thing, Nero Video makes it very easy to turn a set of vertically shot videos into an edited vertical video.
If, on the other hand, you are of the persuasion that vertically shot video is"¦a suboptimal format to retain when performing post production (that sounds diplomatic, right?), Nero has a two-click solution for this. In a regular SD/HD/4K project, right click on a vertical video and choose "remove black bars". That's it. From there, Nero automatically fills the dead space with a larger, lower contrast, slightly-blurred iteration of the video, just like news stations use, pretty much automatically. Seriously, two clicks and done, complete with an "apply to all the vertical videos in this project by default" button. The defaults look okay, but depend heavily on the source material. A number of customization controls get added to the effects palette to optimize the look, though I wish "˜brightness' and "˜contrast' was amongst them. Alternatively, they have a set of backgrounds built into the effects area which can help fill the space. While I would have liked them to be motion backgrounds instead of static ones, the static ones do look very nice, and they have a wide variety of colors to help match whatever is in the foreground.
Other parts of Nero Video remain largely the same: Rhythmsnap is still a thing, and video and audio effects/transitions still do what they do. I will say that the text labels for the tools next to Rhythmsnap look a lot better and make it clear which functions they represent, so that is a subtle-but-welcome UI change. There are new menu sets for disc menus this year, which I know was a point of contention for the 2016 release. Though a number of them do have a bit of a "90s CGI" feel to them, I'm hard pressed to think of another DVD authoring application that has animated menu intros which incorporate the video clips and chapter menus "“ even Adobe Encore doesn't do this by default and will only do this sort of animation through hours of work in After Effects. There are a few standout menu designs, and a number of the space-saving static 2D menus look great for longer projects which benefit from conserving disc space.

Other parts of the suite seem to have more modest changes"¦
Recode's interface seems largely unchanged, but its integration with the MediaHome library means it's possible to do cool things like selecting a TV episode by series and season or by searching for its title. It's quick too; an 89 minute .mp4 file I tested transcoded to a default .MKV in less than six minutes. Also note that not every single phone or tablet model is listed; while the Samsung Galaxy S8, iPhone 7, and other flagship devices are listed, less-known devices might not be. If you don't see your device, the generic profiles look pretty good and are intended to be compatible with basically-everything.
Burning ROM is largely unchanged from past releases, though it includes both "Nero KnowHow" and a link to a downloadable PDF in the Help menu; so I definitely appreciate the option. Also, the MP3 encoder now includes both LAME and Fraunhofer options and it's blisteringly quick, if you happen to find yourself needing to encode your own MP3s.
DiscToDevice is still its awesome self, though now a standalone module rather than an integral part of MediaHome. If you've got a DVD that doesn't have DRM on it, DiscToDevice is wonderful"¦but sadly, CSS and AACS make this tool of limited utility.
Though CoverDesigner keeps its 16x16 icons, every command is basically-instant, it pulls data right from Burning ROM projects, and it does both Lightscribe and paper labels as well as ever.
RescueAgent is still a good avenue of first resort. Don't forget about it if you find that you've accidentally deleted something. It won't rescue you from a click-of-death hard disk, but as far as simple deletions go, it's easy-to-use wizard can be a lifesaver.
Music Recorder has been mostly-whitelabeled now, but has its own quirks. A separate account for a non-Nero domain is required to be created in order to get the Premium service, so make sure you sign in if you get a prompt in that regard. Music searching works a bit better than in previous years; my search for "Taylor Swift" got me the audio from a Youtube video for "Ready For It" as the top result, which played quickly and sounded great (for a Youtube video, anyway). Notably, the second result for that same search was from Soundcloud, labeled "Shake it Off""¦and was most definitely not Taylor Swift, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, it's got both the ability to search for particular songs as well as let a radio station play without having to load a metric ton of sketchy Javascript the way most iHeartRadio websites do, so for that alone it's a nice addition.

I'll conclude with BackItUp. Its one good feature is that it will automatically back up your Android device when the machine running the BackItUp service and an Android phone/tablet running the app are in range of each other. This zero-interaction auto-backup is excellent and really should highlighted more...because its desktop backup options are a different story.
It's pretty and it's effective"¦which is about as much good as I can say about it. It doesn't do bare metal backups. It didn't see my NAS, or let me manually specify a network path if it fails to detect one automatically. It doesn't allow me to back up to Amazon or Backblaze or any other cloud-based service. I can set schedules, but not retentions. I can't set any form of pass/fail notification via E-mail. If you don't have a backup of your desktop, use this. If you do, BackItUp isn't dethroning it.

In conclusion, you're probably asking why I gave Nero Platinum 2018 five stars, given that I spent a paragraph discussing the shortcomings of the streaming server and just got done describing core functionality issues with the backup program. Well, there were a few reasons. Primarily, there have been a number of years where it's been close, and I rounded down. Nero's foray into network streaming went from "click play on the desktop and then watch on your phone, and this is totally a good workflow" to "Joey's complaints center around a few readily-patchable areas or require an infrastructure that is less relevant to user-generated media". The two basically-automatic ways to deal with vertical videos in Nero Video that work as well as they do are two more than my copy of Adobe Premiere presently provides, and PowerDirector does itself no favors here, either. The Photo Deduplicator takes the conservative route, making me far more comfortable with its use, and doesn't require massive uploads to someone else's hard disk and processing. Recode, Burning ROM, and Rescueagent haven't gotten massive changes because they were already solid products, and eschew the "change for change's sake" situation that software developers seem to think is desirable when it isn't. Even if BackItUp doesn't outperform some competing apps, it still makes it easy for users to properly leverage an external drive, and I'll take that over "no backup" any day. Overall, even in beta, I didn't have a single crash or application lockup, and while I know that there have been users who haven't experienced the stability I have, I can only attest to what I have experienced, and "white screen freezing" hasn't been amongst them. Nero 2018 is not perfect, and if I were to say it were, I'd be doing everyone a disservice. However, the fact that it does as well as it does, at the price it does, with good usability and reliability and without incessantly nagging its users and with no outright showstoppers"¦it's more than I can say for anyone else in the field, so for 2018, Nero Platinum gets five stars.