You really need to discuss Nero 7 Ultra's other apps too as Nero Burning Rom is not a standalone product. I have used every part of this Suite (currently using v7.2.3.2b),but mainly Nero Vision, Recode and Burning Rom.

Burning Rom works really great. I bet that at least 99% of the problems blamed on Nero are hardware, media and software problems that are NOT Nero's fault. One of the main burning problems is Media that the burner does not "like." After LG recommended some media I chose Verbatim and have had 400 out of 400 successful burns at 16x. You don't realize how great a simple burning app like this is until you try to use other burning apps.

Nero Vision works great and the latest versions utilize all of the space allocated. The only problem I've had with Nero Vision is getting Automatic bookmarks to work. I just don't use it. Perhaps there could be more options for the Menu Interface, but considering that Nero Vision is only one program in a suite of apps it is well worth the money. Note that Dolby Digital should be chosen over LPCM to increase the amount of Video space unless your DVD player is very, very old and can't play Dolby Digital.

Nero Recode works very well. I believe Nero Digital AVC is currently number one (by a small margin) compared to the other available codecs for encoding H. 264 files. You can even convert to Divx compatible format using MP4CAM2AVI most files. The "Main Movie" DVD-9 to DVD-5 option is the easiest I have seen. If your movie will fit the DVD-5 or encodes at 90% I recommend Nero Recode. If you have a HDTV or the compression needs to be fairly high, I tend towards DVD Rebuilder Pro. On a Standard Definition TV, Nero Recode does such a great job it would be almost impossible to tell the difference between programs such as DVD Shrink, Nero Recode and DVD Rebuilder Pro unless the compression (long movie) was really high (ie 60%).

Nero Showtime works well, but on my HDTV seems to have a constant black bar at the top. I use WMP11, Zoomplayr Pro WMV and VLC with the latest K-Lite codec pack and NVidia's PureVideo for DVD's.

Nero Home is difficult to use and needs to be redesigned. I don't see anyone really using this until it is.

As a Suite, if you use two or three of the main apps Nero is well worth the money and the interface while initially daunting to some just makes sense once you've used it a few times and the product is amazingly stable despite all the blaming to the contrary. I believe that Nero Burning ROM should be a standalone product that costs $25-$30 for people that only need to burn.