The folks at Nero have just released the latest version of their popular tool. With each new upgrade there are numerous new features added to the product. In the beginning it was just a tool for burning CD-ROMs and now it tackles numerous multimedia tasks in addition to the burning of discs.

I’ve yet to upgrade to version 9 myself, but I’m an active user of version 8 and will look at upgrading soon. If you need to burn discs, it can handle CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs. We use Nero to master all of our disc-based products and love how easy it is to create a disc.

Where Nero has continued to grow with each version is the many ways it can work with video. It can convert DVDs so they can be played on your mobile devices. Keep in mind that they won’t copy discs that are copy-protected (commercial movies), but there are utilities on the Internet that will quickly disable the copy-protection. If you’ve bought the movie, you should be able to make a copy for your mobile devices! Technically this is illegal, but I doubt this will rankle anyone’s feathers if it is for your personal use. You can also create your own video DVDs with integrated 3D menus.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the many things you can do with Nero. The reality is that I don’t use many of the other features so I just don’t have experience with them. You can download a trial version to find out if Nero is right for you before you have to plunk down your money.