Photo DVD?

[dayamayii]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to burn a (well, many) photo DVDs of an event, to give out at another in just over a week. It seems to burn fine for the mac, but my son's vista notebook just sniffs at it and asks me to insert a disc.

 

I know I have burned these photos once before (months ago), and they were read by someone, using vista.

 

I started this last night in Toast 9, after updating it. I read somewhere then that the latest update may have some problems with DVDs so I decided it was a good time to upgrade, but I'm having the same trouble in Toast 10 $60 later. I have to get this sorted out soon because my available time to do 30 discs by a week from today is barely enough now. I desperately need to move from prototyping to routine.

 

So far, I've been doing it with an icon, and as I type I'm trying it without, in what feels a bit like desperation..

 

What am I missing? These things are supposed to just open up in windows and slideshow aren't they?

 

Thanks

 

 

[tsantee]

From what I can tell the problem is related to the latest updates for Toast 10 and 9 related to Snow Leopard compatibility. If you have a version of Toast 10.0.2 or earlier of 9.0.4 or earlier then burn your DVDs with one or the other. You can use the latest updated version to Save as Disc Image and then use the Image File setting in the Copy window of the earlier version to burn the DVD. If the DVD slide show has both data content (the original photos) along with the video content then you need to mount the disc image and drag its contents to the Data window with DVD-Rom (UDF) selected as the format to burn copies that includes all the content.

[dayamayii]

From what I can tell the problem is related to the latest updates for Toast 10 and 9 related to Snow Leopard compatibility. If you have a version of Toast 10.0.2 or earlier of 9.0.4 or earlier then burn your DVDs with one or the other. You can use the latest updated version to Save as Disc Image and then use the Image File setting in the Copy window of the earlier version to burn the DVD. If the DVD slide show has both data content (the original photos) along with the video content then you need to mount the disc image and drag its contents to the Data window with DVD-Rom (UDF) selected as the format to burn copies that includes all the content.

 

Thanks for replying so quickly, tsantee. I haven't upgraded to Snow Leopard yet - I haven't found time yet to do an audit of whether various important software will be compatible. So that's not it for me.

 

I couldn't read the burn without the icon on the Vista notebook, either. I booted my iMac up into XP via bootcamp and it DID read it ok. I have no reason to suspect any problem with the notebook drive.

 

I haven't tried again just yet. I'm not sure what you mean about the slideshow. I just dragged the photos out of the media window and into the disc, and for burning I have the data window open, using the photo disc selection. Do you think it would be better just to burn a plain dvd-rom then? (Why have the photo one if it doesn't work?)

 

 

Thanks

[tsantee]

Thanks for replying so quickly, tsantee. I haven't upgraded to Snow Leopard yet - I haven't found time yet to do an audit of whether various important software will be compatible. So that's not it for me.

 

I couldn't read the burn without the icon on the Vista notebook, either. I booted my iMac up into XP via bootcamp and it DID read it ok. I have no reason to suspect any problem with the notebook drive.

 

I haven't tried again just yet. I'm not sure what you mean about the slideshow. I just dragged the photos out of the media window and into the disc, and for burning I have the data window open, using the photo disc selection. Do you think it would be better just to burn a plain dvd-rom then? (Why have the photo one if it doesn't work?)

 

 

Thanks

The Photo Disc setting is for playing on computers. It should have worked on any computer with a fairly modern optical drive. You could test with a different brand-name disc to see if that is why it didn't work on the notebook.

 

In the video window you can create what is called a DVD slide show by dragging in photos after choosing DVD video as the format. This can also automatically create the Photo Disc and data files of the photos if you click the box to add the original photos to the disc. The DVD slide show portion of the DVD has the photos encoded and scaled to work with standard definition DVD players. The quality is good on a TV but less than what you'll get on a computer using the Photo Disc. The spec for video DVDs is a maximum of 99 photos per DVD title, so you will end up with multiple titles in the video DVD's menu if you have more than that many photos. You can experiment with this by choosing Save as Disc Image. When you mount the disc image your Mac will launch DVD Player and play the DVD slide show. Note what I said about burning one of these combination DVD slide show/Photo Disc disc images to disc (you need to use the Data window instead of the Copy window).

 

Creating a DVD slide show takes time because of the encoding and rescaling required (just for the DVD slide show; nothing is changed for the Photo Disc or original images portion).