Compression Is Useless?

[vocaro]

I have a folder on my hard drive that I want to burn to a single DVD-R. Toast says the directory is only 4.35GB, so there shouldn't be any problem fitting all of it onto one disc. Just to be sure, I turn on the Compressed option; the data happens to be highly compressible (lots of text files), so it should shrink down a lot.

 

After clicking the burn button, I see a Verifying Items dialog box, followed by this message:

There's not enough free space on this disc: 2309949 sectors (4.41 GB) are needed, 2298496 sectors (4.38 GB) are available.

 

It appears that Toast didn't even attempt to compress the data before writing it to the disc! The only option at this point is to abort the burn.

 

Apparently, there seems to be no purpose whatsoever in turning on compression. It doesn't do any good to calculate disc space according to compressed size; compression won't save me any discs that way.

 

Am I right in thinking that the compression option is therefore absolutely useless? If not, what am I missing?

[gchunav]

You are looking for/thinking of data/file compression, as in using software like zipit

 

Compression in this situation is in regards to video compression. This video compression will adjust to fit more than 2 hours of video onto a single layer dvd. Single layer dvd fits 2 hours or less of video The final disc is a dvd-video disc (watchable on a standard, stand alone dvd player), as opposed to a dvd-data disc, (readable as data files on your computer)

 

 

Garry

 

.

[freshburn]

Are you using 7.0.2?

[tsantee]

You say that Toast didn't even attempt to compress the data before writing it to the disc. But from your description you didn't let Toast do anything other than verify the files you wanted to burn were present on the drive. Nothing got compressed and nothing was burned to the DVD because you abandoned the process before it began.

[vocaro]

Are you using 7.0.2?

 

Yes, 7.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.4.

 

Nothing got compressed and nothing was burned to the DVD because you abandoned the process before it began.

 

I didn't abandon anything. Here's what I did: I started Toast, dragged the folder onto the main window (which automatically created a new disc set with the folder's files in it), made sure the Compression option was enabled, then clicked the Burn button. This opened a dialog box that allowed me to select a drive and optionally specify advanced options. I then selected my drive and clicked Record. That's when I saw the Verifying Files dialog box, which ran to completion -- I did not cancel it -- and then I was given the message about not enough space on the disc.

 

In other words, Toast abandoned the process, not me.

[freshburn]

Save it as a disc image and then burn the image. See if that works.

[vocaro]

You are looking for/thinking of data/file compression, as in using software like zipit

 

Yes.

 

Compression in this situation is in regards to video compression.

 

But I am in the Data tab, not the Video tab. You are referring to the DVD video compression that was introduced in Toast 7 (borrowed from Roxio's Popcorn product). If you look at the FAQ for Toast 6 -- which did not have the DVD video compression you are referring to -- you will see that they talk about compressing data, not video.

 

Save it as a disc image and then burn the image. See if that works.

 

That is a workaround I'm sure would work (assuming I create a compressed disk image). But the thing is, I shouldn't have to do that. In the Data tab, there's an option for compression that should do this for me automatically. However, if Toast refuses to burn the data if the uncompressed size is larger than the media size, then this option is completely useless. It appears to be a bug in Toast.