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Burning sucessful DVDs on Mac

I

insch

macrumors newbie
Original poster
What I am trying to do is create a DVD video that will play in a domestic machine. I have encoded my video to MPEG2 using Innobits BitVice which I understand is as about as good as it gets and then I have dragged the file into the Video tab in Toast.

The resultant DVD-R disc plays fine on my Mac DVD drive but will not play in the domestic machine I have tried (Pioneer DV444) which apparently does play DVD-R discs. It won't get past the menu (if there is one) or I just get a spinning disc icon in the corner of the screen. I am using TDK DVD-R discs. I have set toast to PAL, Video quality high.

I have also tried dragging a Quicktime Ref file into Toast and creating a DVD video - same problem.

Any advice? I am currently using Toast v.6.0.9 but I am considering an upgrade to v.7. Will an upgrade to Toast v7 make any difference? I don't want to spend the money if I will be no better off.



Thanks
 
Do you have other machines you can try it on? Or other DVD-R media you could use? Those would be my first two suggestions.

Unfortunately, the best case scenario for burned DVDs is only about an 85% compatibility rate. At my work we have 3 different generations of DVD drives (some burners, some ROMs) in various Macs and a half dozen different brands of set top players and on more than one occasion we've received burned DVDs that would only play on some (or even none) of the devices.


Lethal
 
Thanks

I have since managed to do a DVD in iDVD, using the same file and same TDK media - it played fine on the Pioneer. Something going on with Toast.
 
i could be wrong (since i've never used toast), but isn't it just a burning program? (like nero on a pc). if so, if you burn a mpeg on a disk, it's like burning a data disk, correct? so of course it only works in a computer. that's why you need a program like idvd (or sonic mydvd for a pc) to burn to a dvd that will play in a dvd player. but i could be wrong
 
A DVD is always a DATA disc, so are CDs, they are all data discs.

What matters is what data, in what format and where on the disc.

On an audio CD, its .WAV/PCM/AIF files NOT inside folders.

on a DVD for video is is a folder called VIDEO_TS which has .NFO/BUP/VTS files in it, that conform to a "dvd standard" allowing for every player to recognize.

Now if you just burned the VTS files to a DVD, you have the video files but its not in the correct format to watch on a set top DVD player. But you can still watch it with VLC player, as a movie file on your computer.

A DVD authoring program creates the VIDEO_TS folder for you in the correct hierarchy/format.

A DVD burning program merely puts the data on the disc.
 
Sdashiki said:
A DVD is always a DATA disc, so are CDs, they are all data discs.

What matters is what data, in what format and where on the disc.

On an audio CD, its .WAV/PCM/AIF files NOT inside folders.

on a DVD for video is is a folder called VIDEO_TS which has .NFO/BUP/VTS files in it, that conform to a "dvd standard" allowing for every player to recognize.

Now if you just burned the VTS files to a DVD, you have the video files but its not in the correct format to watch on a set top DVD player. But you can still watch it with VLC player, as a movie file on your computer.

A DVD authoring program creates the VIDEO_TS folder for you in the correct hierarchy/format.

A DVD burning program merely puts the data on the disc.
Click to expand...

right, so is Toast a dvd authoring program? if it is, then you have to tell it to create the VIDEO_TS folder, correct?
 
No toast is STRICTLY a burning program.

ALTHOUGH in version 7 i think they added a built in encoder, like what they had for VCDs. So you can drag any quicktime compatible video file to toast and it will encode (taking a long time of course) it for you.

But you have really no control over the menu, chapters, quality etc, that you have encoding the video in Compressor or BitVice etc.

So you have MPEG2 files, with a .mpg2 or .m2v extenstion.

Those files are the correct format for DVD video but not in the correct "language" i guess is the word I can use. Because if you take any DVD movie you have, open it on the desktop youll see lots of VTS files, those are the video files from the MPEG2 footage, made into a .vts file. Same thing, just made into a .vts from a .m2v. I believe it includes tags like anamorphic, macrovision and the chapters etc.

So you need an authoring program to do this for you. Like I said the new Toast will, but youd want something like iDVD or DVDSP to do this, so you have more control.

Youd take the MPEG2 videos you have, import them into a DVD authoring program and make your menus, buttons etc. Then you will click something along the lines of "Build Disc/DVD". This will create:

VIDEO_TS folder
AUDIO_TS folder

the audio_TS is just part of the dvd standard and only for DVD audio discs, so you dont HAVE to burn this to get it to work.

burn this VIDEO_TS folder to a DVD. Viola.

basically using bitvice/compressor over the built in ones found in DVDSP, Toast and iDVD is the control you have over the quality/size of the final file. But as an all in one solution, the formers work wonders insofar you dont need 3 programs to go from footage-mpg2-burned disc. iDVD for instance can do all three steps, including burning.
 
Going the other way

A friend sent me a DVD, plays fine on my MAC but is a VIDEO_TS folder. I want to excerpt one small part of it, but have unable to figure out how to do it. Anyone have ideas? converg
 
converg said:
A friend sent me a DVD, plays fine on my MAC but is a VIDEO_TS folder. I want to excerpt one small part of it, but have unable to figure out how to do it. Anyone have ideas? converg
Click to expand...

Try Handbrake. You can convert the DVD (chapters) to an MPEG-4.
 
Toast doesn't do a very good job at authoring DVDs. iDVD does a great job but takes sooooo long. My solution to the problem is I use VisualHub to convert video files to DVD, which I then burn in Toast. Works every time.
 
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