HC Encoder & Nero Audio Plugins

A long time ago this website used to be an official point of distribution for two cool pieces of software. There are still a lot of back links pointing to these URLs and people clicking on them, so this is how things stand today.

HC Encoder

HC Encoder is a high quality MPEG-2 video encoder developed by Hank315. It was primarily used to compress the content of a DVD to fit the 4.4GB capacity of a recordable DVD-R. Most movies exceeded that without extra compression. HC Encoder achieved that with excellent visual quality and it was available as freeware, which made it extremely popular at the time.

HC Encoder still exists and the latest version v0.25 is from 2015. You can get it from Hank315's website hank315.nl. Note that his site does not have a SSL certificate in place, so your browser will warn you.

Nero Audio Plugins

Nero Burning ROM was a versatile software for recording your own CDs. The version one was released in 1997 and it immediately gained traction on the market. Nero was a good mix of decent usability and advanced features. Nero software still exists and they sell a variety of multimedia related applications.

The Nero Audio Plugins was an unofficial set of software libraries that extended the audio format support (AAC, AC3, APE, ASF, FLA, PAC, MP3, MPC, OFR, OGG, RA, SHN, SPX, WMA) of early Nero Burning ROM versions. Today they are irrelevant and thus there isn't any need to distribute them.

If you are still looking to burn some audio bits, there are some good free and open source solutions available:

• CDBurnerXP is a free burning application for Windows that is even used by some large enterprises and government officials. It supports a good variety of audio file formats (MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, WMA, APE, MPC, WV (WavPack), ALAC (Apple Lossless).
• If you are using Linux, then look for Brasero or K3b packages for your distribution of choice.