WayneH

...other than removing the "expiring soon" warning?

Keep an eye on your encoding settings. The bitrate settings can be no more than about 13/16 (average/max) for putting HD onto a DVD. These values work for my Sony BD player. If your player cannot tolerate settings this high, you'll suffer stuttering. The default bitrates in Toast are set MUCH lower, so that may explain why you saw a degraded result. Also be sure to use AVC, as this will give a somewhat better result for a given bitrate. I think the Toast default was MPEG-2. To be fair to Roxio, I think you WILL get the same result for a given setting. It's just that the default settings are different if you're doing a BD versus a DVD. Now a different angle on your topic: I've just compared my bluray-on-DVD project (HD video plus hi-quality photos) to the same content burned to a DVD using iDVD. A friend needed a DVD copy as they have no BD player. I wanted to see just how "bad" it was stepping back down to regular DVD. In iDVD, I was sure to use "professional" encoding to get the best possible result. Well. there is indeed a clear loss of resolution even on my 720 plasma. Score one for Toast. On the other hand, I was VERY pleased to be able to put my entire project onto a single slick looking DVD, instead of three separate not-so-slick disks as I get from Toast. The overall result from iDVD was quite nice and most folks probably wouldn't pick out the resolution difference, but it's clear if you're looking for it. PROBLEM: The iDVD version of my project was better saturated than the Toast version. I had noticed a "fogginess" to the Toast output and doing the comparison to iDVD made it clear. So now I'm wondering if there's something I can do to fix this on future projects.

When you say you made a blu-ray, do you mean a true BD or do you mean "blu-ray on DVD"? Jerkiness in the latter is often because the encoding bitrate is set higher than the red laser DVD technology can tolerate. You need to set max bitrate to ~16 and the average lower, say 13. And your results may depend on the particular player you use. My Sony BD player seems to tolerate the 16/13 setting pretty well but standard DVD bitrate is half that or even less. If you've made a true blu-ray and it's jerky, I have no clue.

D'Oh! You're right - the image Toast produces is only as big as it needs to be. I was thinking it made an image as big as a disk, but of course that's not the case. I'll have to give your fix a try.

Like others, I have struggled with the -18771 error. In my latest project just this week, I first tried to use 10.0.7 hoping once again it would "just work". It didn't, and I reverted to 10.0.2 which has been pretty reliable in getting through encoding. I'm VERY CURIOUS about your discovery. Please elaborate. When you get the saved disk image out of Toast, you said you burn that to disk using DU. But isn't the image from Toast much too large to fit a DVD? Sorry if that's a stupid question but I want to try to duplicate your success, and I need step-by-step details.

Hmmm. I can confirm this does NOT work for me. I get chapters every 5 minutes, or whatever the duration, but no text showing chapter names and no use of chapters as assigned in iMovie. I've been passing my movies to Toast in AIC format. Perhaps your luck is a result of feeding Toast an mpeg-2 movie. Did Toast need to encode this movie or did it go directly to multiplexing?

It means you need to use version 10.0.2 to perform the encoding.

Take a look at your source tracks. I found that when my movie ended with a fadeout, iMovie would export the movie with a sound track shorter than the movie. (Maybe FCP does this also?) The soundtrack did not extend all the way to the end of the fade. This doesn't cause a problem in iDVD (or DVDSP ?), but I think Toast expanded the soundtrack to fit the video. In my case this caused a growing sync gap that was over 5 seconds by the end of my movie. If this is your problem, it's very easy to fix. Just use Soundtrack Pro to set the audio track length to the same exact length as the movie. You can probably use QT pro to do this also.

Wow, this is huge for us G5 folks. When you add in the -18771 error issues, it's clear that G5 users should stick to 10.0.2. I've asked before but I'll ask again - What are we missing by being "stuck" back at 10.0.2? I'm trying to weigh the advantages/disadvantages of 10.0.2 versus, say, 10.0.7.

A "quicktime movie" could include anything playable using QT, so the term alone really doesn't mean anything. With all the codecs and settings combinations, the options are endless. MPEG-4 doesn't tell the whole story either, but in general it means H.264 compressed (=AVC). That's the best codec around and commonly appears on BDs, but it also allows for many settings. For instance it's often used for preparing iPod movies,and those wouldn't look so good if you're trying to get blu-ray quality. I've had luck exporting from iMovie to AIC and encoding that with version 10.0.2. Take care to be sure your encoding settings are "AVC" at an appropriate bitrate (<17 if you're going onto a DVD). Then take the .264 made by Toast and drag it into the Toast window of version 10.0.7 so that multiplexing and burning can continue in the newer version.

It's maddening, but at least the tip I gave above has solved it for me ~90% of the time.

Try an experiment: Turn down your encoding bitrates to below 18 Mbps, which is the limit for the red laser technology of DVDs. Try anything less than 15 avg. and 17 max. I've had success with those values. This may or may not solve your error, but either way it will make for a smoother playing disc. Higher bitrate burns, even if they succeed, will cause jerky movement and other errors on playback.

I responded to this question in another thread: http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=64990

I think you mean the dreaded error -18771. It's gotten a lot of attention in this forum. The only workaround I know of - and I can vouch for since it's what I've been doing - is to use version 10.0.2 for encoding. Save your Blu-ray DVD to a disk image and then rescue (without quitting Toast) the .264 and .ac3 files it makes in the Roxio Converted Items folder. By rescue I mean move them out of that folder, otherwise Toast will delete them. You can then drag the .264 file into the 10.0.7 window. It should find the audio file by itself, or you can help it if need be. Now when you save to disk, Toast will proceed directly to multiplexing and not re-encode. If it all goes smoothly, then go ahead and burn a DVD. You could skip 10.0.7 altogether if you're happy with the disk image from 10.0.2. But that version has "issues" with chapters that are addressed by the later versions. I don't know why, but the older version seems to give a much higher success rate at encoding. And I believe it may be faster also.

I know you don't want to hear this, but maybe you should "just" rebuild your slideshows in iMovie or iPhoto or even iDVD. It's very easy in both and you have tons of control easily available; cropping, Ken Burns effect, straightening, music placement, various cross fades, etc. I've never used Roxio tools for making slideshows, so I can't really help with that. Hopefully someone here can. BTW, have you tried simply burning your project to a disk image? You could then mount the image and use DVD Player to play it just like any DVD. If the image works, burn it to disk. Otherwise trash it and make changes before trying again.