[rwilock]

So I followed the suggestions on this forum and used the previous version of Toast (7.01) for making my latest music DVD. (I tried earlier using the latest version of Toast (7.02) before I read about the problems. Silly me, I would have thought if Roxio knew of a serious problem that cost its users a huge amount of time, it would have corrected the problem by now.)

After about 10 - 11 hours of encoding, Toast finally began to burn the DVD. I have a LaCie external drive which burns at 16X and am using DVD +R also rated at 16X. I have a Mac G-4 running system 10.3.9. The time indicator came up showing about 3:05 to burn. Now, almost seven hours late it is down to 1:47.

Why does it take so long? Copying data or even copying other DVD's takes only minutes.

Also, I just read about the suggestion of making a disk image first instead of burning the DVD. Is there a way to do this after I burn the DVD? Can I save the encoded data? How do I do that?

I have been using Toast 6 for some time with no obvious problems, although I am new to making DVD's.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[tsantee]

rwilock, on Feb 22 2006, 11:01 AM, said:

Also, I just read about the suggestion of making a disk image first instead of burning the DVD. Is there a way to do this after I burn the DVD? Can I save the encoded data? How do I do that?

I have been using Toast 6 for some time with no obvious problems, although I am new to making DVD's.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

You can choose Save as Disc Image after Toast finishes the DVD and no re-encoding will be needed assuming you don't quit Toast (which empties the Roxio Converted Items folder by default). You can prevent the emptying of the converted items folder by changing a setting in Toast preferences.

The extremely slow burning speed is a bad omen. I'm concerned your DVD ultimately will have problems. I don't know why this is happening. It may be that Toast has used up the RAM with the encoding and the data flow to the drive is moving at a crawl. But that's just wild guessing. The Save as Disc Image approach for these long processes is the way to go.

[rwilock]

tsantee, on Feb 22 2006, 01:04 PM, said:

You can choose Save as Disc Image after Toast finishes the DVD and no re-encoding will be needed assuming you don't quit Toast (which empties the Roxio Converted Items folder by default). You can prevent the emptying of the converted items folder by changing a setting in Toast preferences.

The extremely slow burning speed is a bad omen. I'm concerned your DVD ultimately will have problems. I don't know why this is happening. It may be that Toast has used up the RAM with the encoding and the data flow to the drive is moving at a crawl. But that's just wild guessing. The Save as Disc Image approach for these long processes is the way to go.

Thanks.

I will try that when this is finished burning.

The DVD drive is brand new and seems to be working fine for other purposes. It burns CD's in about 2-3 minutes. It will copy a music DVD fine and does it all in under 10 minutes.

I have 512Mb Ram. Maybe this is the problem. Nothing else is running except for Toast.

[wedamonjr1]

I am having exactly the same problem on a 1.67 Ghz Powerbook with 1 GB RAM. I assembled a Music DVD in Toast and it took 7 hours to Save As Disc Image...

The DVD played o.k. on both my mac and a windoze box in the house but when I put it in a brand new Sony DVD Player (which is set to Region 1 but supposedly plays discs set to ALL Regions) I get an error message that says "Playback prohibited by area limitations."

So I have now wasted an entire day making a Music DVD that won't play in a regular DVD Player.

Great!!@#$

[tsantee]

wedamonjr1, on Apr 7 2006, 05:14 AM, said:

I am having exactly the same problem on a 1.67 Ghz Powerbook with 1 GB RAM. I assembled a Music DVD in Toast and it took 7 hours to Save As Disc Image...

The DVD played o.k. on both my mac and a windoze box in the house but when I put it in a brand new Sony DVD Player (which is set to Region 1 but supposedly plays discs set to ALL Regions) I get an error message that says "Playback prohibited by area limitations."

So I have now wasted an entire day making a Music DVD that won't play in a regular DVD Player.

Great!!@#$

I can't explain why you got that error on the Sony DVD player. Toast's DVDs are burned for playback in any region. There is no region limitation. That only exists on commercial DVDs. I suggest burning to a different brand and/or type of media. For example, if you used DVD-R try DVD+R or vice versa.

I'm presuming it took 7 hours to encode the audio tracks and about a minute to write the disc image file. The audio encoding does take a surprisingly long time. It is faster to use the PCM audio setting but that limits the amount of music on a DVD to about 7 hours maximum.

[wedamonjr1]

tsantee, on Apr 7 2006, 06:21 AM, said:

I can't explain why you got that error on the Sony DVD player. Toast's DVDs are burned for playback in any region. There is no region limitation. That only exists on commercial DVDs. I suggest burning to a different brand and/or type of media. For example, if you used DVD-R try DVD+R or vice versa.

I'm presuming it took 7 hours to encode the audio tracks and about a minute to write the disc image file. The audio encoding does take a surprisingly long time. It is faster to use the PCM audio setting but that limits the amount of music on a DVD to about 7 hours maximum.

Actually it took 6 hours to encode the audio tracks and just over an hour to write the disc image file to a firewire drive. Also, I tried the Toast DVD on a different DVD Player (a 5-year old Pioneer DVD Player) and the Pioneer Player didn't have a problem with the Region but the DVD would not play properly. The menu screen seemed like it was in a continuous scroll mode in black and white. Needless to say thus far I am not impressed with this particular feature of Toast!

[freshburn]

Are you using PAL or NTSC and what region are you actual in?

[wedamonjr1]

freshburn, on Apr 7 2006, 12:02 PM, said:

Are you using PAL or NTSC and what region are you actual in?

I didn't change anything regarding the format and the Toast Preferences are set to default to NTSC. However, when I saved it as a disc image it defaulted to PAL instead of NTSC. (I wonder if I burned it directly to disc if that would change anything? I hate to just try that, given how long it takes...)

I am in Region 1, not that that seems to matter, since it is supposed to be playable in all Regions.

I have no idea how to force it to burn an NTSC disc since the preferences are already set that way. I rummaged through the help files and all the menus and all I can find is something that says you pick the format using the Toast Preferences. That clearly doesn't seem to work. Any suggestions?

ps on any interesting side note, I also have Roxio Creator 8 on a PC (that I rarely use). I tried to burn a similar music dvd using Creator 8 and it worked, and created an NTSC disc, but being windows, the graphics and menus are really clunky compared to what Toast produces. Plus the windows version couldn't find most of the album art which Toast found and incorporated with each song.

I would much prefer to do this with Toast if I can just figure out this PAL/NTSC thing.

thanks

bill damon

[freshburn]

Well, it should be an NTSC disc. How do you know it defaulted to PAL? Did you get an error? If you only have music files, then it should always produce an NTSC disc. If you have a video file mixed in, it may change to PAL if the video is 25fps.

Toast is pretty smart about the PAL/NTSC and should give a message if mixed content exists.

Make sure to use toast 7.0.1 for Music DVD. 7.0.2 has an audio bug.