[MW Forums]

If OS X’s built-in burning abilities aren’t enough for you, you won’t find a better burning application than Toast 7.0.1—as long as you don’t mind the archaic mail-in rebate process and price. more

[Netizen_Kane]

I'm annoyed that there's no inverse telecine feature here or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Mac world. I understand that DV imported from camcorders doesn't need it, but those of us with DV media converters do. Then again, I can also understand that they wouldn't want to support what they consider "piracy" when we archive shows off the air.

[snowyowl]

Review states:
"Toast 7 includes the functionality of Roxios $50 Popcorn 1.0 (4.5 mice; June 2005), software that can compress a costly dual-layer DVD movie for backup on a standard blank DVD (for legal reasons, you have to decrypt the DVD yourself before Toast can compress it)."
My test [and that of another Mac user] says this is not true. While Popcorn will allow DL burning over 4.7GB on 'standard' media, Toast 7 throws up a message that stops the operation because it has detected a disc that is not 'costly' DL media. For both testers: the same DL drives and media batch used at each site with the same result.
I don't know whether Roxio is protecting me for myself or protecting the profit margins of disc makers... either way I don't like it.

[Filipe_Martins]

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I'm annoyed that there's no inverse telecine feature here

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Good point.

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or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Mac world.

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Only to a certain extent.
A few tools refer to inverse telecine as "reverse telecine", causing some confusion. In both cases, it is the same feature called by a different name.
To be precise, Cinema Tools 3 (included with Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Pro 5) sports the command "Clip > Reverse Telecine" and also "File > Batch Reverse Telecine..." for inverse telecine:-)
Reverse Telecine (inverse telecine) removes the extra frames added during 3:2 pull-down commonly used when transferring film to video or when downconverting 24P video.

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or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Mac world.

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This is almost an insult to Final Cut Pro 5:-)
But perhaps you are right, this feature should be more common in other software tools on the Mac.
Filipe Pereira Martins & Anna Kobylinska

[fribhey]

that's interesting....
this is taken from roxio's website under the 'features' section for Toast 7:
"Copy DVDs Because Kids Happen
Compress and backup an entire 9 GB dual-layer DVD to a standard 4.7 GB DVD disc. Extract just the main movie, audio and language to maximize video quality and use of disc space. Create 9 GB disc images with iDVD 5 and your double-layer SuperDrive, and burn to affordable 4.7 GB DVDs with Toast 7."
that is EXACTLY what popcorn does. i just ordered it so i'll test it out when it comes in.

[Machound]

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Encoding is slowit took 36 minutes to encode a 22-minute DV file to DivX format on the dual-2.3GHz Power Mac G5but the quality was quite good considering that the file size was reduced by 95 percent.

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Jonathan, I'd say that's pretty fast. I was expecting to hear about the 24 hour transcode times people are reporting for 1080i --> 720p DivX. Still, more info about DivX would be helpful since this is the first DivX 6 encoder on the Mac and the ONLY DivX encoder that works in Tiger.

Can you please confirm whether it's truly possible to put 20 hours of 480i DivX on a single DVD as the Roxio rep suggested in MacWorld's discussions following the Toast 7 announcement last month? How reliable is DivX transcoding? (Is it crash resistant?) Some real world performance measures would be appreciated. The DivX feature may by itself justify this upgrade's cost -- if it works.
Thanks for clarifying these issues, and for your concise review.

[ajunginator]

Am I going to be able to spread some Jam on my new Toast?? Or is Sonic only selling a plain version?
Also, I agree with the need for ditching the rebates for upgradeds, especially when the rebates are not valid outside of the USA. Not useful from their customers, like me, to the north and those overseas.
Please encourage Roxio to change this.
Cheers, Andrew.

[ajunginator]

Okay, did a little more looking and yes, the rebate is good in Canada, but the way the rebate form is worded, you have to read the French part to see that it is. Strange. Last time I checked, Canada was bilingual.

[minderbinder]

Good question.
So assuming this version of Toast lets you burn many hours of vcd/svcd to DVD media, will a dvd player play it?
I'd love to be able to fill a DVD with a ton of video at a lower quality.

[Jon Seff]

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Jonathan, I'd say that's pretty fast. I was expecting to hear about the 24 hour transcode times people are reporting for 1080i --> 720p DivX. Still, more info about DivX would be helpful since this is the first DivX 6 encoder on the Mac and the ONLY DivX encoder that works in Tiger.

Can you please confirm whether it's truly possible to put 20 hours of 480i DivX on a single DVD as the Roxio rep suggested in MacWorld's discussions following the Toast 7 announcement last month? How reliable is DivX transcoding? (Is it crash resistant?) Some real world performance measures would be appreciated. The DivX feature may by itself justify this upgrade's cost -- if it works.
Thanks for clarifying these issues, and for your concise review.

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I'm on vacation right now in NY, so I don't have any of the files in front of me that I used--but I didn't have any crash problems with DivX transcoding, and as far as I recall everything came out OK. I used the default home theater profile, and the resulting files (one from a DV file I shot, and a few from some smaller AVIs from Canon digital camera) looked very good and were vastly reduced in file size. I don't know about the 20+ hours, but you can fit a lot of standard def footage in DivX format on a 4.7GB DVD.
As for speed, I like realtime encoding on a fast dual-processor G5 (don't we all), but I can see your point about it not being that slow...especially if people are used to iDVD's MPEG-2 encoding /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[Machound]

MinderBinder, not just any DVD player can handle DivX -- only a DivX certified player can. Fortunately these are increasingly inexpensive. My $250 I-O Data LinkPlayer2 can handle all standard DivX formats (480i & high definition) in addition to numerous other formats and streamed high definition content over my home LAN. Cheap DivX capable players are entering the market at under the $100 price point, but those don't have network streaming capabilities or HD playback -- yet.
Meanwhile, where are all the devices that are supposedly going to take the H.264 revolution forward? Answer: there aren't any. The DivX Consortium is kicking Apple's backside.
Jonathan, thanks for your thoughts. If Roxio can pull off DivX DVD creation with 10-20 hours of SD content on a 4.7 GB DVD in under an hour, who's going to want to use iDVD anymore? This is a major step forward on the Mac platform -- but only if it works reliably!

[Peter Cohen]

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but I didn't have any crash problems with DivX transcoding, and as far as I recall everything came out OK

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Nor did I, and I wrote the hands on look we posted on Toast 7 a couple of weeks ago.

[ncj37]

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I'm annoyed that there's no inverse telecine feature here or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Mac world.

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Actually, there is a FREE program that will do both adaptive deinterlacing and inverse telecine. It's called JES Deinterlacer and it's been available for several years now. JES Deinterlacer does a number of different tasks -- deinterlacing, inverse telecine, standards conversion (NTSC to/from PAL), and field dominance reversal. It's completely free and works on just about any version of Mac OS X. You'll also want to download JES Video Cleaner (also free). You can get both at VersionTracker.com.

[steve333]

Toast 6 Titanium is garbage. I bought it specifically to burn VCD's and so far i haven't been able to successfuly burn one MPG clip onto a CDR!
Taost gives me error messages or says there is something wrong with the clip. What a joke. I tried many different clips from different sources.
I downloaded iVCD to try and it had no problems with anything. Unfortunately it is slow as molasses, but at least it works. It's also half the price.
I emailed Roxio to mention the problems I am having with their product and they don't reply at all.
In my opinion, Roxio is garbage.