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How to Ask For Help on My.Nero |
posted by IanFarquhar at 1 year ago
One of the reasons my.nero exists is to provide a forum for people to get help.
Unfortunately, many people seem unable to provide even the most basic and obvious information needed to help them. It's really amazing that so many requests for help go something like this:
"I'm trying to copy a movie onto DVD, but it's not working. "
Errr... great. I'm sure that makes sense to the poster, but put yourself in the position of someone who's trying to figure out what the poster is doing. Some of the things they might be wondering are:
- What exactly is meant by "not working "? Is it not playing in a DVD player? Or a your computer? Is the program crashing?
- What program are they using, what version?
- Are they burning a DVD-Video to play on a DVD player, or a DVD-Data disk which goes into a computer.
- Where is the source video coming from? What format is it in? Are they doing any editing or using transitions?
- What sort of DVD burner do they have? What DVD media are they using?
So, let's try and put some suggestions for info you might like to include in your problem report:
- The programs you are using, and their major version numbers
- Your operating system version (eg. Vista, XP, 2000, 98 etc.)
- The model of your burner (if disks are involved), and the type of media you're using (eg. TDK DVD-R blanks)
- If the problem involves reading in audio or video from some other source (eg. a video camera), let us know the format of the data you're trying to read
- If the problem involves some other piece of hardware (eg. a DVD player), let us know the model
- A full description of how to replicate the problem, from start to finish. You should be including enough detail for any of us to reproduce the issue on our systems.
Politeness and courtesy is also appreciated. Noone is paid to be here, even the MVPs, and are not obliged to help. Sounding off might make you feel better, but it isn't productive, and the only person who'll admire your vitriol is you.
Finally, when you do ask a question, and someone spends the time to answer, please check your post and let them know if it worked or not.
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IanFarquhar wrote at 1 year ago
Response to UncleDave
1) You need to ditch the Internet Malware Writer's Toolkit - aka. Microsoft Internet Explorer - and install Firefox. Firefox includes a spell checker, and I can confirm it works well with my.nero. Opera is another option, although you need to install a third party tool to get spell checking with that browser.
2) I can't say too much, but I got word last night that changes are afoot on my.nero which will see some significant improvements. NeroDude, can you reveal any more at this stage?
4-5) Yep, that was what I was referring to.
All I can say here is that the issue of product splitting was raised in Aug-Sept during the initial beta testing, and that it was escalated within Nero.
The issue here is that the licensing authorities are basically CE manufacturers, whose mindset is based on selling boxes. Their license offerings largely reflect that mentality (per box pricing). You can't function split a DVD player, you see.
Function splitting a product so that playback occurs on PC X, while transcoding occurs on server Y, is a really challenging issue for this mob (who, as you can probably tell, I don't hold in high regard. IMO, most of their patents are obvious and/or trivial, and should never have been granted.)
Twonky is a good product, but the whole point is that it doesn't do transcoding, and therefore doesn't have the licensing issues which affect Nero Home. BTW, one of the best features of Twonky is the fact that it runs on MIPS under Linux, allowing it to be deployed on low-power servers like access points and Linksys SLUGs.
I'm actually - gulp - going to defend Microsoft a little here. I've been in companies which consider Microsoft to be the enemy for most of my career, so this is atypical for me.
I do believe that XP needed an update. It has serious security, managability and scalability issues which are problems now, and will be big problems very soon. But Vista was not the solution they needed. Indeed, Vista wasn't even the solution they wanted originally (go look at the original Longhorn feature list, and see how much actually ended up in Vista as planned). So they got the motivation right, but royally screwed the solution, IMO.
As for Nero 8, bear in mind that the majority of the 240M copies of Nero out there are bundled with disk writers. Although the suite is moving beyond being just a CD authoring application, the need to stay current with the latest optical disk technology is critical for the survival of the product.
The biggest change, and one which I believe justified the upgrade from 7.x to 8.x, was the introduction of high definition optical media (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray). The "behind the scenes" changes needed to support this functionality are non-trivial. I therefore respectfully disagree that this was done for marketing reasons alone.
Re: support end of life. I've not actually found a document which spells out when a Nero release becomes EOL, aside from the downloads page which lists Nero 6 and before as "discontinued". I'll see if NeroDude can shed any light on this matter, as I agree it's something which should be more explicitly documented.
Sorry to hear about your problems with Home. The reinstall is how I'd proceed, except I'd not reinstall scout at all.
UncleDave wrote at 1 year ago
Monday morning coffee....
Hi Ian,
1) Community search: you are right it looks a lot better. Some English language sites offer a spell check function (which I need) I doubt it would be practical to use at this is a multi-lingual site. One thing I would like to be able to do is to find the blogs that I have contributed to.
2 & 3) Forums & Support: I think Nero should realise that irrespective of their intentions for this site, the majority of postings are for support. I know of no better mechanism for offering external support than the classic forum. While my current support problem isn't being answered as quickly as I would like, I do feel that after a month we are getting somewhere. If I were using the software commercially I would have been using a new product by now! I really think that Nero should use a tool like Jira for their "official" support the current model just "sucks" (couldn't think of a better word). You get a email confirming your issue with no tracking number or confirmation of the problem you have raised. That, IMHO, is a real poor start to the support cycle, just my 5c.
4) As I've said before, this specific issue likely not Nero's fault. The ridiculous patent situation, where codecs are covered by literally hundreds of patents all demanding licensing fees and imposing per-installation charges on Nero, make splitting the product while complying with the licensing very difficult. I'm a big proponent of patent reform, and here's yet another example of the stupidity the current system imposes.
I think you are referring to:
4) Your product offering - great suite of products, but I'd like to run the Home Server on my file server and everything else on my PC - how about looking at that model? I am not going to pay for two full licences! How about a home licence that lets people slice and dice the products? What product are you going to roll out for Windows Home Server? Are you going to?
If so, you point is entirely reasonable. I know from my use of the product that two full licences is overkill. As you can read from my blog I have been looking at Twonky Vision. At €29,95 it probably isn't as good a value a Nero, but it's a 850Kb download that does everything except that MediaHome does except transcode or stream DVB. It's a LOT faster than Nero to index and so far is a lot more stable than Nero, I don't need to put up with Scout melting my processor either. As a matter of interest last night I switched off Scout and told MediaHome just to index folders its self. I got an error message that there were missing components. No idea what was missing just missing components. I had to switch Scout back on.
5) This I solved on my own.
As for the Microsoft model - I understand your argument and would would make a similar argument to try to ensure that there is balance in this blog. I have a number of points (now there's a surprise) to raise here. Firstly why compare to Microsoft? IMHO there was no reason for Nero to move to version 8 just as there was no compelling reason for M$ to move to Vista other than revenue stream. I have relied on others in the forum to "test" the version 8 release, as I have said in my blog there is no compelling reason for me to upgrade. This is a problem that software houses are going to find more and more as changes start becoming small and evolutionary. How do you convince a customer that the x man hour development that resulted in a 25% performance improvement is worth it? I may be wrong (did I just say that? ;-) BUT it appears that Nero are offering a lot of "specials" on upgrades or when buying version 8. Companies normally don't do that if their sales are strong.
A new software release does not somehow absolve any company from the obligation of supporting their previous release, the only way that they absolve themselves from that commitment is to offer a upgrade to every user. Only then could they refuse to support a previous version. To suggest that they can just close the door on support for version 7 is, with all due respect, naive. Even M$ publish the support life-cycle of their software.
BTW - Nero Home just stopped working last night. Nothing happened, it just stopped working. I tried to remove Nero Home, the installer told me Nero Home was removed, it just looks like everybody forgot to tell my PC that Nero Home was removed. So tonight I'll un-install the entire suite, run the cleaning tool, reinstall, run the +250Mb web update then then wonder why the hell I am sticking with the product!
IanFarquhar wrote at 1 year ago
Replies...
UncleDave: no probs. I know the feeling.
nreo8stinks: I'm in Kuala Lumpur right now, but will be returning home over the weekend. I'll run some tests then. Are you running the latest version of Nero (8.1.1.4, released 20/11)?
UncleDave wrote at 1 year ago
Will reply
Hi Ian,
I have been really crazy for the last couple of days - I will replay and post the info that you requested as soon as (this week I hope).
UD
Response to nreo8stinks
I've tried to duplicate your problem on 8.1.1.0. but have been unable to do so. The input files I used were a diverse collection of files between 10M and 400M in size, and using various video codecs including DiVX. I tried a number of permutations to get it to crash upon adding a file, none of which caused a crash (note: I'm running this on Vista 32-bit Ultimate).
Exactly which version of Nero 8 are you running, and can you give me a series of steps which crash on yours? And which version of N8 are you running?