Just bought - glacial speed!

[ImaginaryTango]

I'm on macOS Mojave, 10.14.3 and just bought Toast last night and have encountered serious problems already.

First, I find it disappointing that I can buy and download a brand new program and, right away, it tells me I need updates. Maybe, for most people, that's not an issue, but for those of us without a hardwire internet connection, that's a waste of bandwidth that can cause trouble with monthly quotas or take a long time on non-wired systems that don't have hard line data quotas. Plus, when I downloaded the companion programs (Aftershot and Paint Shop Essentials) there were issues with registration and downloading updates. Honestly, I felt like I was back in 2005 instead of 2021.

But the big issue is Toast is glacial. Actually, it's worse. I ran Toast to rip a DVD - McHale's Navy, the TV show. In other words 7 or 8 half-hour episodes of an old B&W TV show in standard DVD resolution. We're not talking HQ resolutions for this. I had the DVD in my drive, which I have used to rip close to 8 TB of video from TV shows for my media server. When I told Toast to use the DVD for input, it took 15 minutes (I am not exaggerating) of beach-ball spinning, maybe longer (only 15 minutes that I can be sure about) before I could do anything else. Then I tried to click the checkbox for the main "movie," which is all the episodes strung together in one video file. I couldn't without more waiting. I clicked on Options, since nothing was happening. More waiting. I can't remember my reasoning, but I exited Options to deal with just the main window. All in all, it was more than 5 minutes total, from when the DVD loaded, before I could start clicking on the checkboxes to deselect the long movie and pick the shorter episodes.

I specified to use MP4 files for the destination and didn't specify extra options. That was 2 hours ago and for about 90 minutes the status has read "6% done." In the time I wrote this post it went from 6% to 12% done.

As I mentioned, I've done a lot of ripping. I buy DVDs (prefer to have the physical media!) and then rip them and store them on our media server. (With rural internet, and unreliable streaming, this is a good alternative.) I've got between 8-9 TB of such videos. In the past I've paid about $20 - $30 for a ripping program, less for a CD burner (I need CDs to use for various reasons), and maybe another program for a media converter. This time I was preparing for an upgrade on my iMac to Big Sur and my old ripping program won't work on the update, so I did a lot of research and decided Toast should do all I wanted.

Now I have very serious doubts about Toast.

Seriously, 2 hours to get to 12% complete when ripping an old B&W TV show in DVD resolution? Normally other programs don't take anywhere near half an hour to rip the same.

Am I doing something wrong or is it just that Toast has serious issues? (I have seen other posts, here and elsewhere, about Toast being lethargic.) I'm beginning to think I wasted over $100 on this program. I hope I'm wrong.

[ImaginaryTango]

I had hoped to get some kind of response like, "Wow, it never takes that long, something's wrong," and maybe ideas for what to look at - and that MAYBE someone from Roxio would say, "That's a problem. Let's see how to fix it."

No response - so now I'm thinking this must be normal for Toast - that it takes forever to do anything? I'm going to see about a refund because this is so slow it's unusable and violates any promise of useability that Roxio makes by advertising the product.