[Conal Walsh]

I currently have Toast 7 on Mac OS Leopard. The facility for burning a DVD from a VOB with compression is dysfunctionally slow, taking 12+ hours to do a single DVD while using less than 3% CPU. I assume that the problem is a consequence of an old application running on a much newer OS (one hopes that it hasn't always been like this).

Can anyone confirm that this facility in Toast 9 works correctly and in reasonable time?

Thanks

[tsantee]

It certainly works in Toast 9 but the speed depends on the speed of the Mac.

You refer to VOB. It's been a long time since I've looked at Toast 7. Does it have the DVD video from VIDEO_TS setting in the Video window where Fit-to-DVD is an option? Is that what you're using? Neither Toast 7, 8 or 9 works properly if you drag a VOB directly to the Video window as those must be converted to MPEG via the Media Browser to work in Toast. But I'm presuming you're working with a VIDEO_TS folder.

[Conal Walsh]

It certainly works in Toast 9 but the speed depends on the speed of the Mac.

You refer to VOB. It's been a long time since I've looked at Toast 7. Does it have the DVD video from VIDEO_TS setting in the Video window where Fit-to-DVD is an option? Is that what you're using? Neither Toast 7, 8 or 9 works properly if you drag a VOB directly to the Video window as those must be converted to MPEG via the Media Browser to work in Toast. But I'm presuming you're working with a VIDEO_TS folder.

Toast 7 allows me to select (or drag) the VIDEO_TS folder from a DVD image into its window. Yes, I am using "Fit to Compression". The fact that Toast is consuming less than 3% CPU tells me that the speed of my Mac is not an issue (it is a fast machine in any case ... 2x2 Woodcrest at 3 GHz).

I ran the conversion overnight and encountered a more serious problem: once the compression is finished, the burn fails with an apparent underrun error before it has even spun up the DVD. Furthermore, if I save the result to an image file, and then try to burn the image to a DVD as a separate step, it fails because the image file is very slightly (about 2 MB) too big to fit on the DVD. Hence the facility is unusable in Toast 7.

Thanks!

[tsantee]

Toast 7 allows me to select (or drag) the VIDEO_TS folder from a DVD image into its window. Yes, I am using "Fit to Compression". The fact that Toast is consuming less than 3% CPU tells me that the speed of my Mac is not an issue (it is a fast machine in any case ... 2x2 Woodcrest at 3 GHz).

I ran the conversion overnight and encountered a more serious problem: once the compression is finished, the burn fails with an apparent underrun error before it has even spun up the DVD. Furthermore, if I save the result to an image file, and then try to burn the image to a DVD as a separate step, it fails because the image file is very slightly (about 2 MB) too big to fit on the DVD. Hence the facility is unusable in Toast 7.

Thanks!

Something is going very wrong but I don't know if the problem is because you're using Toast 7. The Fit-to-DVD process from a VIDEO_TS folder should go very quickly on your Mac. I'd be surprised if it took as long as an hour. I haven't checked the CPU usage of Toast when doing fit-to-DVD but three percent does sound very low.

There are many improved features in Toast 9 for making single-layer DVDs from DL discs or disc images. So you might like having that upgrade in any case. However, I suspect that something else is amiss in your situation. One possibility is that Toast is having difficulty reading the source video.

If you buy Toast 9 as a download from Roxio they have a period of time when you can request a refund if you decide you don't want it after trying it out.

[Conal Walsh]

Something is going very wrong but I don't know if the problem is because you're using Toast 7. The Fit-to-DVD process from a VIDEO_TS folder should go very quickly on your Mac. I'd be surprised if it took as long as an hour. I haven't checked the CPU usage of Toast when doing fit-to-DVD but three percent does sound very low.

There are many improved features in Toast 9 for making single-layer DVDs from DL discs or disc images. So you might like having that upgrade in any case. However, I suspect that something else is amiss in your situation. One possibility is that Toast is having difficulty reading the source video.

If you buy Toast 9 as a download from Roxio they have a period of time when you can request a refund if you decide you don't want it after trying it out.

I've purchased Toast 9 and it does not suffer from the problems exhibited by Toast 7. It's still not as fast as it could be (it's only using one of my four cores) but 10 minutes is obviously a big improvement from 12+ hours.

Thanks.

P.S. At 500 MB, you guys could put up some stiff competition against Microsoft for bloatware :-)
P.P.S. Now another wretched mail-in rebate ...