[ping pong]

I am able to take a dvd which i bought, use mac the ripper to decode it, use dvd remaster to shrink it, and use mac's Burn Folder to burn it onto a 4.7 gb dvd and play it back on my mac or a pc, but it won't play on a standard dvd player... why is that?

[tsantee]

I don't know what you mean by "Mac's Burn Folder." If you are using Toast to burn a VIDEO_TS folder then choose the "DVD video from VIDEO_TS" setting in the Toast Video window.

By the way, you don't need DVD Remaster because Toast can do the shrinking. Choose the ripped VIDEO_TS in the setting described above and an Options button will appear. It gives you the option to include just the main movie (or you could choose to keep the entire contents). Toast then shrinks the content to fit before burning the disc.

[ping pong]

tsantee, on Aug 8 2006, 05:38 AM, said:

I don't know what you mean by "Mac's Burn Folder." If you are using Toast to burn a VIDEO_TS folder then choose the "DVD video from VIDEO_TS" setting in the Toast Video window.

By the way, you don't need DVD Remaster because Toast can do the shrinking. Choose the ripped VIDEO_TS in the setting described above and an Options button will appear. It gives you the option to include just the main movie (or you could choose to keep the entire contents). Toast then shrinks the content to fit before burning the disc.

i just bought a mini mac and do not have Toast. I was using the burning software which comes with the apple computer which is just a folder called burn folder and you put things in it and hit burn....not very sophistocated.... So are you saying that i have to buy additional software to burn movies onto my super drive? I find it odd that the computer doesn't come with the proper software to go along with it's superdrive....

[tsantee]

ping pong, on Aug 8 2006, 09:43 AM, said:

i just bought a mini mac and do not have Toast. I was using the burning software which comes with the apple computer which is just a folder called burn folder and you put things in it and hit burn....not very sophistocated.... So are you saying that i have to buy additional software to burn movies onto my super drive? I find it odd that the computer doesn't come with the proper software to go along with it's superdrive....

Apple's disc burning apps (except for iDVD & DVD Studio Pro) only format DVDs in HFS+ and ISO 9660 formats. Video DVDs must be formatted in UDF format. So you either need Toast or some other application that supports UDF format.

[olbooker]

ping pong, I would think confusion exists here since this is a Toast 7 discussion board. I'm sure discussion groups relating to the other programs, you mention, are available.

I'll try to clear up some things here.

Not condoning piracy, but MacTheRipper is quite the excellent program for ripping. I've used it and actually paid for the latest versions. We all know what it is for (wink wink) but won't discuss that. So now you have a VIDEO_TS folder with your ripped movie. With PCs, my choice of program has always been DVD Shrink. Couldn't find a suitable (read that free) program to do compression on Macs. You found DVD Remaster, but that didn't fit my requirement of free and $50 seems a little high for what it does.

I tried a competitor's (to Roxio) program by the name of DragonFlix. It is supposed to give choices of re-compression, re-authoring, re-encoding, and burning. So far, it does little of what it promissed and the biggest problem is ignoring your set burn speed (low) and burning at max, making an unusable disc for most home players. So much for that hope of a program that could do most of the work in one program. Now I am trying Toast 7, but have not had a chance to use it as I write this.

If you have been trying to copy files from the VIDEO_TS folder to disk with the Burn Folder, I don't believe that will work. It possibly would on a computer, but not on a stand-alone player.

You could use a program by the name of DVD Imager to convert the VIDEO_TS folder to a disk image and then burn it with Apple's Disk Utility. That works great and you want to specify a lowest burn speed to hopefully be skip-free on a home player.

Some of these programs are getting harder to find (legalities, etc.), but are out there.

And tsantee....

Do you really not know about Apple's Burn Folder? It is available in Tiger, but I don't remember if it was in the previous versions.

I do hope Toast 7 will satisfy my burning needs. Sure has a lot of features for the money.

[tsantee]

olbooker, on Aug 12 2006, 01:59 PM, said:

And tsantee....

Do you really not know about Apple's Burn Folder? It is available in Tiger, but I don't remember if it was in the previous versions.

Yes, seriously. But now I know. The only ways I've burned discs in the past with Apple's tools is by inserting a blank disc for Finder burning or using Disk Utility. I never noticed the Burn Folder item in the Finder's File menu. That approach definitely will not work to create a UDF formatted video DVD. However, your suggestion of using Disc Imager does work. And all of this is moot when using Toast in the first place.

[olbooker]

One other thing about Burn Folder... unless you want your disc labeled Burn Folder, you should rename the folder to something else.

I finally tried Toast 7 yesterday. It worked great. Here's hoping that it doesn't misbehave like some other users have reported. Of course I am using the last of the G5 iMacs and latest OS. Haven't had this computer choke on anything so far.

tsantee, on Aug 12 2006, 03:07 PM, said:

Yes, seriously. But now I know. The only ways I've burned discs in the past with Apple's tools is by inserting a blank disc for Finder burning or using Disk Utility. I never noticed the Burn Folder item in the Finder's File menu. That approach definitely will not work to create a UDF formatted video DVD. However, your suggestion of using Disc Imager does work. And all of this is moot when using Toast in the first place.