Nero MediaHub is a rich media browsing application that fails to bring anything new to the experience. It has very few features, and is not as capable as many of the free media management applications out there.
You can only create slideshows of images and videos, and create playlists of Music. For some strange reason you can only add music files to a playlist, for images and videos you need to create slideshows!
You cannot even copy or move files from folder to another, instead you have to rely on Windows Explorer to perform all these tasks. You can delete files though. Editing file metadata isn’t possible, however you can browse your audio collection by using the metadata.
When you browse a media category, such as Music, Photos or Videos, your media is collapsed into groups based on your how you have chosen to arrange it. For music you could stack based on artist, album, year and other metadata; for photos, you can arrange by folder, month, day, and recent, no more meta data is supported, and videos can be arranged the same way as photos with the additional option of arranging by duration.
In any case when you double click on a stack, it opens up in the next view, where you once again get to see all your media, but grouped not stacked by the metadata of your choice. This seems a little redundant. In this view you can see the thmbnails of each media object and on hovering on the photo / video you will see an expanded thumbnail. You can double click to start playing a video, or viewing your images. For music, opening a stack will list all the music in the stack grouped by album with album covers.
To its credit it does take advantage of Windows 7’s Libraries features instead or requiring you to configure all your media location in yet another application. You can configure folders manually if you want, which is something that is necessary for Windows XP and Vista users.
Nero MediaHub is then a simple media discovery and playback application, which will let you view your existing media is new ways. It has a few image editing features but nothing to boast of. A great number of free application do a much better job at this than Nero MediaHub.
What Nero MediaHub does have going for it, is that it can be used to publish videos to a DVD as DVD-Video or AVCHD without straight from the interface. You can also click on the “Advanced Authoring” button to create a new Nero Vision compilation with the video in question. You can also publish you videos to popular social video hubs such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, and Nero’s “My Nero”.
Nero MediaHub can also be used to play back all kinds of videos, and thanks to its support for hardware acceleration, it was able to play back even a (small) collection of 2K videos without problems. While Nero MediaHub can play all kinds of media files from ASF to MKV, and it can play back DVDs as well, it is not able play back BluRays. This we believe is a rather big flaw since creating BluRays is an important part of other bundled Nero products.
While Nero MediaHub does have a rich interface, which allows one to browse their media with ease, it is simply too underpowered to be of much use.
Images on next page.
Working with Images
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| Overview view of our Image collection | Browsing images | Viewing a slideshow of images. The carousel of image slides fades in to allow navigation |
Working with Music
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| Music overview showing the albums we searched for | Expanded album view of the same | Music publishing to a disc. We can publish an Audio or MP3 disc |
Working with Video
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| Video overview mode | Browsing our video collection. A video thumbnail pops up as we hover over it | Playing higher-than-HD video | No BluRay playback supported |
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| Publishing video to disc | Publishing video to online video sharing sites | ||
Misc
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| Context menu for media content in MediaHub | Importing content into MediaHub |
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