Mulling Over An Upgrade To Toast

[rz]

Not sure about v6, but I still use v7 under Leopard and it works fine. I recently burned a bunch of avi files to DVD, and Toast lets you create a decent interface to be able to click on buttons to play each file.

[Seacrest]

I'm still considering a sidegrade to marmalade, maybe preserves.

[Doc]

Toast 7 was the last decent version for burning AVIs to DVD.

Toast 8 introduced a bug where widescreen video files would sometimes get transcoded improperly and the resulting DVD would play choppy/jerky/spastic video on any player other than software DVD Player App in OS X. It's much more prevalent if your source files are PAL.

They know about the problem. There are periodic posts in their forums about it. They've had sample files and DVDs sent to them and some of the (employee) mods in their forum have admitted to being able to reproduce the problem.

Toast 9 still has the bug.

Toast 10 still has the bug.

It used to be that while they introduced a slew of new bugs with every (Roxio) release of Toast, they at least introduced a few desirable features in new releases. Toast 8 introduced BD burning and TiVo support. What's new in Toast 9 and 10? Anyone? Any killer features to make it worth the expense and aggravation? Bueller?

[freeradical]

michaelb wrote:
I bought the upgrade to toast 9 last year, also coming from 6 I think. I got it for the disk spanning.

If you have individual files that are too big for one optical disc, you can split them with the donation-ware program Split&Concat. I think this program is simply making use of the underlying Unix utilities in OSX.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~loekjehe/Split&Concat/

[thermarest]

freeradical wrote:
What does Toast do that the built in disc burning utility that comes with the OS doesn't?

It seems like it's quite expensive for a one trick pony.

Like Gareth said, the OS X built-in burning used to take FOREVER because it would write everything to the HD, then burn. I haven't used it in years so I don't know about Leopard.

I'm still using Toast 6 most of the time. It weighs in at about 14MB. Isn't Toast 9 like 125MB or something?

Versions 8-10 get horrible reviews on VersionTracker. Might want to check those out before laying down the $.

[Doc]

thermarest wrote:
[quote=freeradical]
What does Toast do that the built in disc burning utility that comes with the OS doesn't?

It seems like it's quite expensive for a one trick pony.

Like Gareth said, the OS X built-in burning used to take FOREVER because it would write everything to the HD, then burn. I haven't used it in years so I don't know about Leopard.
Apparently you don't know about Tiger, either.

Burn folders use aliases, not copies of the original files.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?...h2154.html

[JoeH]

Not seeing a reason to upgrade yet myself. Then again I keep an old version running on my StarMax because it would make proper copies of data discs in valid CD formats other than Joliet or HFS. Used to use it more in the past to make backup copies of discs for non-Windows or Mac OS's, but still useful for bit-by-bit copies when needed. A few years later, Roxio also removed that copy capability from its PC CD software.

[Fred_Also]

I use 'Burn' to burn .avi to a DIVIX disk. It open source.

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html


Fred Also

[clay]

Toast 6 still works fine on my 10.5.6 mac pro. I've been tempted to update several times when there were rebate deals, but never had any compelling reason to do so since I have other tools to do all the DVD stuff.

[ADent]

Toast 5 still works with Leopard.

I upgraded to Toast 9 to get some video editing and other features. The video editing was somewhat broken (as was in Toast 8), but they actually fixed it with 9.0.4! Anyways I got it off eBay for $30 and it was worth it.