12 replies to this topic

[markcpeters1]

I recently purchased and installed Toast 9 along with its latest update. Compared to Toast 8, the time to create a disk image has increased by at least a factor of 4. Have you also seen this decrease in performance? I have a 1ghz G4 with 768 MB of RAM running 10.4.11. I have many gigabytes of free disk space.

[tsantee]

I have had situations when something went very much slower than usual but I don't recall the conditions or if it also happened at times with Toast 8. I suggest shutting down your Mac and leaving it off for a few minutes before restarting. Also you might want to trash the Toast plist and prefs files in your user library preferences folder.

[markcpeters1]

I wish to post some additional information. Using Toast 9, it took 8 hours 36 minutes to build the image file. After building the image file, I closed Toast 9. I then opened Toast 8 and built an image file from the same source file that I used in Toast 9. The Toast 8 build time was 38 minutes. This is a HUGH difference. I do not believe that restarting the system will buy much of anything. According to the "Activity Monitor," there are over twice as many threads in Toast 9 than in Toast 8.

[tsantee]

I wish to post some additional information. Using Toast 9, it took 8 hours 36 minutes to build the image file. After building the image file, I closed Toast 9. I then opened Toast 8 and built an image file from the same source file that I used in Toast 9. The Toast 8 build time was 38 minutes. This is a HUGH difference. I do not believe that restarting the system will buy much of anything. According to the "Activity Monitor," there are over twice as many threads in Toast 9 than in Toast 8.

I'm trying to recall the times that happened for me. I think it was with some EyeTV recordings and I "fixed" the issue by first demuxing the EyeTV MPEGs into separate video and audio streams and then added the video stream to Toast (which automatically matched the audio stream). The problem it seems was in demultiplexing. Are these MPEG 2 files?

[markcpeters1]

The file is an EyeTV MPEG 2 file.

[tsantee]

The file is an EyeTV MPEG 2 file.

Ahh, my memory is intact. This is a bug in Toast trying to demux a  video in an EyeTV wrapper and hopefully it will be fixed in the next update. In the meanwhile, in EyeTV choose Export as separate streams and add the video stream to Toast. It probably will multiplex even faster than you experienced with Toast 8 although you'll have to wait for the export to be completed.

[markcpeters1]

I took your advice and exported the file. It was successfully processed using Toast 9 without Toast 9 doing the encoding step. There still is the problem of Toast 9 doing an encoding step. This needs to be fixed. Thank you for your help.

[markcpeters1]

I would like to complete this thread. For my EyeTV MPEG 2 files, Roxio customer support had me use custom encoding with re-encoding turned off instead of being set to automatic. This workaround did solve the problem of generating good disk images without going through the encoding step.

[richard_briscoe]

I recently purchased and installed Toast 9 along with its latest update. Compared to Toast 8, the time to create a disk image has increased by at least a factor of 4. Have you also seen this decrease in performance? I have a 1ghz G4 with 768 MB of RAM running 10.4.11. I have many gigabytes of free disk space.

If I understand your posts correctly, Toast either will change from "Multiplexing" the .eyetv file to "encoding" or may actually begin with "encoding" rather than "Multiplexing" when you select an EyeTV file and click "Toast".

I also have experienced this far too often, but have been unable to determine a particular cause as some EyeTV files have this problem and some do not. The "encoding" is an extraordinarily slow process in my experience. I am using Leopard rather than Tiger as you are for the most part, although I have encountered this in Tiger as well.

If my experience seems to be similar to yours, would you please report this to support@elgato.com. They have had difficulty isolating the problem as to whether it is an issue with the eyetv file or is purely a Toast issue.

I also have had Toast crash more times than I can keep track of during multiplexing as well as writing. Toast 9 has not been a terribly pleasant experience so far.

Thanks

[timwentford]

I also have had Toast crash more times than I can keep track of during multiplexing as well as writing. Toast 9 has not been a terribly pleasant experience so far.

I've given up trying to use Toast 9 and gone back to Toast 8. Too many crashes during writing was getting too expensive in wasted media! Hopefully a free upgrade at some point will eventually make Toast 9 useful.

[richard_briscoe]

I've given up trying to use Toast 9 and gone back to Toast 8. Too many crashes during writing was getting too expensive in wasted media! Hopefully a free upgrade at some point will eventually make Toast 9 useful.

Yea, I think you are right. I may as well do that for al the good 9 has done. 8 still has some problems, but not to the extent of 9.

[warnergt]

I would be happy with slow encoding.  Toast 9 won't encode at all for me.  It runs for a few seconds and it just sits there saying "Encoding."  It is using virtually no CPU.

[richard_briscoe]

I would be happy with slow encoding.  Toast 9 won't encode at all for me.  It runs for a few seconds and it just sits there saying "Encoding."  It is using virtually no CPU.

What OS are you using? Also, what Mac (CPU and such)?

There seem to be some differences in the result (a matter of degree, I suppose) between OS 10.4.x and 10.5.x, but also between Toast 9 and Toast 8. Toast 8 seems to have less of the problems, but typically uses more system resources.


I believe what you are experiencing is what is what we are talking about. When "encoding" rather than "multiplexing", Toast will take a number of hours to complete something that should take only a few minutes, if it completes the task at all.

I would encourage you to also file a ticket with Roxio and to let El Gato know about it as well. They need to know that the problem is not an isolated one.