Dvd Resolution Problems With Toast 11.1

[dking]

I have MPEG4 640x320 files from Vimeo I'm trying to put on a standard DVD. They look fine on my Mac, even when I expand them to full screen. When I use Toast 11.1 to encode / burn them on a standard DVD, they look terrible. It doesn't look like there is any way to change the encoding. If I get the Blu-Ray add on, does that allow more options with encoding, yet allow me to play the video on standard DVD players?

 

Thanks,

Dave

[tsantee]

Toast does have a custom encoder settings window where you can adjust the bit rate and do a couple other settings. However, it probably won't make a difference here. The Blu-ray plugin adds another setting where users can choose MPEG 4 or MPEG 2 as the encoder but that option is available only when creating a Blu-ray format. Those can be burned to standard DVDs if space is available but must be played by Blu-ray players.

 

The custom encoder settings window is accessed by clicking the "Customize..." button and then the "Encoding" and "Custom" buttons in the window that appears.

 

Are the videos on the DVD appearing as wide-screen with no borders on the left or right sides? If so, either Toast is expanding the pixels or they are being expanded by either the disc player or TV. That reduces its image quality. You can see if Toast is doing this by inserting the burned disc in the Mac, choosing DVD in the video tab of the Toast Media Browser, and dragging one of the videos to either the DVD video section of the Video window or the Video Files section of the Convert window. Toast will display the resolution of the video in its window.

 

If you do have a Blu-ray player connected to your TV you might check if the player can play videos burned as data discs. Mine does. In that case you can use the DVD-Rom (UDF) setting in the Toast Data window to burn the videos to a disc. You don't get a nice menu this way, but it may do the job. The Blu-ray player or the TV are still likely to zoom the video but it may look better because there was no mpeg 2 encoding.