How To Burn So Dvd Plays On Mac, Windows And Dvd Player?

[Web Guy]

Hi Folks:

 

I have Toast 11 Platinum and trying to figure out how to burn a DVD so that it will play on a Mac, Windows and household DVD player. It appears in the software that you can burn so it will play on a Mac and Windows machines OR DVD player, but not all three.

 

These are small business training DVD's and I own the content. Just want to make it easy for my clients by providing them one DVD that will cover all bases.

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

John

[Derek Dean]

Howdy John, and welcome to the forum.

I've never burned a hybrid disc, only Mac and DVD player stuff, but according to the Toast .pdf manual (page 58), it should be fairly easy to do by making a DVD-ROM. Page 59 discusses making a Hybrid Disc. In case you haven't seen the Toast .pdf manual, it can be found by opening toast, starting a project, then going to the Help file menu at the top of the screen. Click on Toast Titanium Help and that should open a very thorough and well done .pdf instruction manual (assuming you have Adobe Reader).

 

The thing I've found really helpful when I'm trying new stuff with Toast is to first create a Disc Image BEFORE burning anything. This let's me preview how it's going to look and work before doing a burn. You do that by getting your project ready to burn, then instead of burning, you go to the File menu at the top of the screen and select Save As Disc Image. That saves a file on your computer that works EXACTLY like a DVD. To preview it, go the Toast Utilities menu at the top of the screen and select Mount Disc Image. Then you can use either the Toast Roxio player or the Apple player to preview the disc. To UNMOUNT the disc, use the EJECT button at the top right of your screen (or go to the finder and find the Eject button for the disc there). When I've got the Disc Image looking good, I usually burn a DVD-RW (or +RW) directly from the Disc Image (which you do by selecting COPY when you open a Toast project), and use that to test the disc out on my other computers, DVD player etc (that way I can always erase it and use it over again). Finally, when everything is working the way I want it, I'll go ahead and start burning my regular DVD-R discs directly from the saved Disc Image.

 

It may sound like a lot of work, but I've found it saves me a lot of frustration over burning discs that don't work. One other point, in virtually every instance that I've had an issue with burning a disc, it's turned out to be something that I did or didn't do, so be patient and spend some time learning the program and trying various things. It's really an amazingly versatile program.

 

By the way, in case your program is lacking the .pdf instruction manual, just contact me by private message and I'll send you a copy through e-mail. Good luck, and let me know if you have any other questions.

[tsantee]

In addition to Derek Dean's helpful post, when you burn a DVD-video in Toast it can play on all three systems. It plays on a Mac using DVD Player and on a PC it autoplays using Windows Media Player. You say you already have these programs as DVDs. In that case just use the Toast Copy window to make duplicates.