Basic Question: Large Mkv Files Spanning/splitting/converting

[iDavid]

Hi fellow Toasters,

 

Pretty simple question I would have thought? My main mac expert friends died recently, such a loss, and I'm not comfortable with online forums but here goes

 

I don't know what to do with large mkv movie files, e.g., 5.6GB, that is, files that won't fit onto one single layer DVD.

 

Spanning doesn't work.

 

I tried burning to a dual layer DVD disk as a data file and it doesn't work.

 

For smaller files I've just copied them to DVD/or USB memory as a data file which my Sony Blue ray capable player handles just fine (most of the time)

 

I'm running an old mac (G4, 1GHz, 1GB ram with Leopard 10.5.8) so transcoding to DVD is really really slow and I avoid it, i.e. using Toasts DVD-video transcoding.

Really any transcoding on this machine is painful. It also means that I'm often limited to legacy software.

 

I don't see the point of encoding to DVD/other formats e.g., Divx when my players have codecs that handle mkv/avi etc most of the time.

 

Now my expensive Sony system wants Fat32 so playing off USB memory suits me most of the time for small files. Some times the Sony doesn't like the files

in which case my $25 set to box from Aldi actually manages better. It also accepts NTFS. However my recent experiments with MacFuse/NTFS-3 (which allow Mac to read and write to NTFS) have failed,

so I might boot up a dinosaur of a PC and see if I can get the mkv files onto a NTFS formatted USB memory stick.

 

A lot of stuffing around, there's got to be a better way.

 

Help appreciated

 

Love and Peace

David (Australia)

[tsantee]

Toast 10 runs on a G4 Mac? I don't know why burning as data to a DL disc didn't work unless your Mac doesn't have an optical drive that supports burning DL discs. Did you choose DVD-Rom (UDF) as the format? It is read by both Mac's and PC's and handles large files. I would expect your Sony system to handle UDF.

 

What makes most sense to me is for you to find a solution that uses an external hard drive rather than burning a disc. Since your Sony system can play from a USB memory stick it should also be able to play from a PC-formatted hard drive.