Digital Home Thoughts: Nero Announces Nero 9

"Nero 9 is the next generation of the world's most trusted integrated digital media and home entertainment software suite. It features new cutting-edge functionality that makes enjoying digital media content simple. This easy-to-use yet powerful multimedia suite, gives you the freedom to create, rip, copy, burn, edit, share, and upload online. Whatever you want - music, video, photo, and data - enjoy and share with family and friends anytime, anywhere."

Nero 9 is out, and it consists of an amazing 22 different applications. Wow. I'm all for "value for the dollar", but that seems to be getting a touch out of hand. Worse, I can't seem to find anything from Nero on exactly what's new and improved about Nero 9. I've tended to prefer Nero over Roxio in the past, but I'm honestly quite weary of these "mega suites" and all of the files and codecs they vomit all over my system. I have to write up a rant about codec rot this week, because my main media editing computer is in a funked-up state with codecs, and I think I'm going to have to wipe it out and roll it back to a squeaky-clean state in order to get things working again - and let me tell you, I'm not looking forward to that.

I tend to use Nero only for CD/DVD burning - most of the other apps they bundle with it aren't best-of-breed - so I think I could get by with a pure CD/DVD burning program. Any suggestions? If Windows Vista burned ISO files, I probably be able to get by with nothing at all.