12. Nero Move it

Nero Move it, $49.99

• Move It M00111
• • Academic Superstore
  • $49.95

What student today doesn’t have an environment filled with multimedia devices? Whether it's PCs, laptops, iPods, BlackBerries, PSPs, digital cameras, HD camcorders, or any of the other myriad devices that are now part of our everyday lifestyles, there’s a constant need to manage and migrate files between all of these devices. Unfortunately, each device tends to come with its own application for trying to do this—computers are likely to have several such apps—and most of them will likely do a less-than-optimal job.

Nero's Move it helps users pile all of their digital media into a central location, apply metadata (such as a star rating) to files, play content, and synchronize media across attached devices. So far, this is standard fare for any media manager. Move it makes uploading media to sites like YouTube and My Nero a snap, but it also helps with downloading video from these sites for synching to mobile devices.

The best part of Move it is its transcoding, the process of taking content formatted one way and converting it into a different format. For instance, Move it could take a high-def H.264 video from a camcorder and transcode it into a much lower resolution MPEG-2 file optimized for a portable video player. In fact, it can perform multiple transcodings at the same time. If the software is running on a PC with a graphics adapter that supports Nvidia CUDA, this transcoding can happen much faster. Lots of apps exist to help people manage their media, but Move it simply does a better job at it than virtually any other such tool now available.