The Civil War Between Mac's and PC'S claims another Casualty

[GeoRW]

My name is George Roland Wills. I am 53 years old, and I was not raised on computers. I once took data processing in 1980, before the internet, when there was only what would come to be known as PCs. No MACs were ever even heard of, where I was in Virginia. My first one I bought in 2006 was found in Richmond at Short Pump. I drove three hundred miles to get it.

There are two things I have enjoyed since 2006. One is Mac computers and the other is Amazon Createspace and Amazon Kindle KDP, both indie publishing concerns. One handles movies and the other handles ebooks, both into which I indulge my limited abilities. You can google my name and search me on amazon and it is all there. I have made about fifty films to date and about that many ebooks written...

The problem is that Amazon is stuck in PC world, and always has been. I have to guess at how to do anything on their site. As their business moved from Fort Sumter, South Carolina to Washington State, their demands upon my limited technical abilities has grown exponentially. And their latest demand is, I fear fatal, to my little enterprise.

Heretofore, I could mail them a DVD cut on my Tiger system 2006 WHITE desktop computer running .dv and .mov files on that disc, and they would replicate that professionally for me, and do a fine job.

However, on October 1, 2014, they had another seizure, and demanded that
I upload all future films as something called .iso files. My computer does not even read these things, apparently, and I have no idea what they are, nor what to do. Apple sold me an ANY ISO MAKER, but that does not seem to do anything at all. Probably because I do not know how to drive it.

Unfortunately, so far, after waiting hours on the phone for help... neither do they at Apple... and there are NO INSTRUCTIONS with the downloaded app... and no David Pogue to come to my rescue with a book that should have been in the box...

Therefore, my questions are these:

1). What is the easiest way to turn a .dv or a .mov file into an acceptable .iso file? It also has to be some insanely small size, as well... but apparently making it into an .iso file will shrink it somewhat, depending upon which way this is done. Or something.

As most all of my movies are sometimes two hour gigabyte beasts of 25 gigs or more (I own 10 and a 1/2 terrabytes of external storage drives) I wonder if going .iso is even possible, and if it will look like it was filmed underwater once they take it in that form. I was never impressed with anything I ever saw on VCD, any way...

2). AM I the ONLY person in the world who is using their system? Even the helper attendants at Amazon send me to their FORMATTING pages... all of which are for KINDLE BOOKS (okay, one part does handle disc artwork, but nothing else)...

The CREATESPACE name is now being used with their eBOOKS, as well as KINDLE, so God knows what name that they now refer to their indie films by wanna-bes like me... or... am I the only one?

I saw nothing on any of these forums nor on any of their discussion pages that even mentions anyone doing what I do... let alone suffering through the blatant discrimination that is absolutely permanent against all Macs by this company... they refuse to make up MAC templates for any reason... and I have been with them since 2008 making films for their company.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

I do have two computers, and besides the white one running Tiger from late 2006 (NOT UPGRADED so that I can still export D8 and minidisc footage back to the camera once again. This one says 10.4.7 as its numbers...

I also have the iBeast; a top of the line 24 inch 2008 3.06 GHz Intel core 2 duo with 4 GB memory and 1 Terrabyte of storage, if memory serves... DDR2 SDRAM.

Whatever any of that means. I can get by functionally in iMovie HD ('06), and FCE4, a little... but I do not speak computer, at all...

It is currently running a recent upgrade of SNOW LEOPARD (10.6.8) from the LEOPARD that it came with, and is running iLife '09 for the green screen effect I wanted.

I upgraded it to go with my iphone 6, to use as a hotspot for the iBeast, which does work very nicely... only my slow-motion movies from the iphone come into iphoto as regular speed, with all of the slo-mo stripped away for some reason...

Thanks in advance!


George Roland Wills

 

[Plutonius]

An ISO is a digital file image of your dvd.

Plenty of tutorials if you do a google search.

 

[GeoRW]

Thanks. I will try this...

Thank you, Plutonius. I will try this!

Can you tell me if the quality will be the same, or if it will look watery or grainy or bad??

An ISO is a digital file image of your dvd.

Plenty of tutorials if you do a google search.

 

[0007776]

The quality should be the same.

 

[GeoRW]

And thank you!

In the notes below the instructions, 10.6.8 has a problem: What do I have to do to do this???

The quality should be the same.

Posted by Mattijs December 1, 2013
Thanks! But on OS X 10.6.8 the syntax didn’t work. I had to change it to:
hdiutil makehybrid -o win7install.iso -iso -joliet win7install.cdr

“win7install” is the name I gave to the disk image

 

[GeoRW]

Not yet!!

Perhaps you would have another one? Another link?

I followed everything on this one:

http://imacify.com/2013/06/how-to-c...dvd-in-mac-os-x/comment-page-1/#comment-32527

... using the broken English he was typing in, and trying to understand it and I made every possible combination possible.

I also read down in the comment notes where a guy who did have success with it had to actually change the typing 'syntax', (however it came to be that he knew how to do that...) and it worked for about six people. Good for them... but I have OLD STUFF:

I have a 2008 iMac desktop and running an upgraded Snow Leopard over an upgraded i-life 2009 arrangement which came originally on an 2008 system from the factory... I am trying to shove a DVD disc I ran on my 2006 White computer... IS ANY OF THAT screwing me up??? Thanks!

Geo

(I run it on the 2006 Tiger white computer because the 2006 dvd burner makes the best videos on a DVD disc; the 2008 rarely if ever does).

An ISO is a digital file image of your dvd.

Plenty of tutorials if you do a google search.

 

[snorkelman]

This isnt really a mac versus PC thing this is Amazon changing their requirements for DVD submissions

A from letting you author a DVD disc, burn it and pop it in the post; where they then read it onto their system as an ISO image,

toB

1 you authoring the DVD disc; ensuring it meets their criteria of being a single layer disc, no bigger than 4.6GB of content in its entirity and with video/audio that doesnt exceed a max bit rate of 6Mbps at any point.

2 Creating the ISO file yourself

3 Uploading the ISO file to them rather than sending a disc thru the post

Why? Well if I had to hazard a guess, then presumably folks were sending them discs through the mail where:

the content was greater than 4.6GB

the bitrate was higher than 6Mbps

the discs they were sending were poor quality burns, or on poor quality media that was giving Amazon hassles reading in at their end.

I wouldn't be surprised if some folks werent even authoring a DVD at all and were just sending them some mov files on the mac side or AVI files on the PC side, and expecting Amazon to turn that into a proper DVD

Sooo... on basis you have a disc that you've authored as a DVD and that meets their criteria, heres one way of turning that into the ISO file they're looking for.

This uses an app called 'Burn'

• Pop the disc in your drive
  
• Open up Safari and go to this page for Burn
  
• http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html
  
• on right hand side you should see a link to 'download 64-bit version' click on this
  
• This will take you to the Sourceforge page for the Burn zip file, and will tell you your download will start in five seconds, just wait
  
• You should end up with a 'Burn' folder saved in your Downloads folder
  
• Move this Burn folder over to your Applications folder
  
• Go to Applications folder, find the Burn folder open it and run Burn
  
• Burn should fire up in middle of your screen
  
• Make sure you have the Copy tab selected
  
• Leave Burn up on your screen
  
• Open a Finder window and in the Finder menu choose the Go menu and select Computer - this will give you a Finder window view of all the drives in your machine.
  
• Find your DVD drive icon in that Finder window
  
• Drag the DVD drive icon onto the Burn window you still have open in middle of the screen and drop it on there
  
• Burn will automatically scan the disc for you
  
• Once its scanned, click the Save button on the Burn window
  
• in the dialog box that appears give your ISO image a name
  
• Pick where its to be saved (eg Documents or Desktop etc)
  
• Hit OK
  
• Burn will read the disc and write it to an .ISO image
  
• Once the progress bar hits 100 percent and you get the completed sound, close Burn

Voila One ISO image of your DVD should now be sat on your Desktop, or your Documents folder (or wherever else you told Burn to save it).

if you double click on that ISO image, OSX should mount it as a virtual disc and you can then open that virtual disc as you would any other disc inserted in your machine.

As the ISO you made is of a DVD then you should see a VIDEO_TS folder and an AUDIO_TS folder in there. If you dont see those folders, if instead you see say a collection of MOV files? Then you havent made an ISO image of a proper DVD authored disc

In more general terms outside of the ISO part of this,

Bit rate - Amazon are quoting a max bit rate of 6Mb per second - thats roughly 42 Megabytes per minute

if your film is 50 mins long including extras then your ISO file shouldnt be significantly bigger than 2100 MB, 100 mins long shouldnt be much bigger than 4200MB

The absolute max Amazon will allow your ISO file to be is 4600MB (for safety sake I'd suggest 4500MB 4.5GB) any bigger than that its likely to be rejected as it would be getting close to needing a dual layer disc.

Basically Amazon have set a bit rate that'll let you get 1 hour and 50 mins max onto a full disc, and an hour long movie onto just over half a disc.

What they wont do is let you use a full disc for just one hour of video - sure the quality might be better using the whole disc for little more than an hour of stuff as you have less compression imposed on your video, but you're going outside of DVD spec, and compatibility on buyers hardware will suffer. Whih would leave Amazon dealing with returns.


Uploading - this could be a thornier problem than creating the ISO
If you have a 4000MB ISO image to upload to Amazon you're going to need a fast internet connection with a decent upload speed

If your connection is 6Mbps down and 1Mbps up then you're looking at absolute best performance of 8 seconds per MegaByte of ISO file (32000 seconds for a 4GB file - somewhere in region of 9 hours to upload it to them)

I've got around 20Mbps max upload speed, so with a perfect connection at its full capabilities no restrictions in between? I'd be looking at 1600 seconds to upload a 4GB file (which is still almost half an hour).

 

[GeoRW]

Thanks. I will try this...

This isnt really a mac versus PC thing this is Amazon changing their requirements for DVD submissions

I was just thinking that the fact that they run two separate systems which do not recognize each other is why I am having this problem. Amazon is all about PC, and after six years stiill have no MAC template for anything, although they do now have Cover Creator, which I use on the PC at the library and this makes my life much easier...

Uploading - this could be a thornier problem than creating the ISO
If you have a 4000MB ISO image to upload to Amazon you're going to need a fast internet connection with a decent upload speed

If your connection is 6Mbps down and 1Mbps up then you're looking at absolute best performance of 8 seconds per MegaByte of ISO file (32000 seconds for a 4GB file - somewhere in region of 9 hours to upload it to them)

Oh, to the sure, the Bedford Central Library PCs will be doing the uploading for me, if it gets done. I went in the other day, and the member dashboard feature DOES pull up to 'upload' a video... it just would not take my .dv video as that upload...

Again, Snorkleman, thanks for your very detailed help. I shall try this now as all else has failed...

 

[GeoRW]

First Attempt:

Okay, I got a thing back that looks like the hard drive image on a white piece of paper that is curled over on the upper right hand corner... When I double click this, it comes up as two folders in a file...AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS.

There is NOTHING in the AUDIO_TS, and there are a number of files in the VIDEO_TS file:

Ten of them, in fact: See attached. Three of these have VIDEO_TS; and seven of them are VTS_00 through _05.

Question 1: IS THIS WHAT I WANTED, and is there any sound with it???

Question 2: Is this what amazon wants??

Thanks!! Geo

 

[snorkelman]

yup that looks like what they're after (dont be concerned about the empty the audio_ts folder that's correct for a standard DVD)

The Audio for your video is included in those big VOB files in the video_TS folder

looks like its the right size too

 

[GeoRW]

getting my hopes up...

THANKS!! Now, if only my computer did not show this image, I could try and upload it here...

Now, if only my Snow Leopard from disc upgrade on my 2008 Leopard original Imac did not show me THIS when I logged in, I could test our experiment right now... (To explain the name, the DVD is called FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY (not GREY) as it is an art instructional DVD to accompany an eBook by the same name on KINDLE from my hyper-realism drawing school..).

Any way I might could upgrade my "browser" to do this? I go to SAFARI on Apple but can find no way to upload anything... Would FIREFOX work if I brought it in??? Or, what does it want???

I thought I had upgraded everything the other day when I did CHECKED AND DOWNLOADED UPDATES...

Thanks again! Geo

 

[snorkelman]

Yes you could give Firefox a try - latest versions should still support Snow Leopard

whereas with Safari I think you're stuck with version 5 on a snow leopard machine. So although you've updated to latest version of Safari 5 its not a high enough version of Safari for Amazons purposes; who may be looking for Safari 7

 

[GeoRW]

Great!!

K. Will try that, and again THANKS SO MUCH!!!

Geo

 

[Alimar]

...only my slow-motion movies from the iphone come into iphoto as regular speed, with all of the slo-mo stripped away for some reason...

In order to get the slo-mo movies from my iPhone 6 Plus to iMac, while maintaining the feature, I had to email it to myself, then download from the email. If that helps at all.

 

[GeoRW]

Tried to load, started, gave same error message...

I put in the version of FIREFOX as suggested by Mozilla... (33.1.1) and did NOT set it as my primary browser, but just opened it as a window (I like what I normally use)...

IT STARTED TO LOAD, but did not, and gave red warnings again... Was it because it is not the primary browser? or..... is it the wrong one, maybe???

----------

Thank you, ALLMAR!! Now, as soon as I learn that technique for emailing movies, I will try that!!

In order to get the slo-mo movies from my iPhone 6 Plus to iMac, while maintaining the feature, I had to email it to myself, then download from the email. If that helps at all.

 

[snorkelman]

IT STARTED TO LOAD, but did not, and gave red warnings again... Was it because it is not the primary browser? or..... is it the wrong one, maybe???

You're probably as well copying it onto a USB stick and trying it on a Windows machine at this stage; whether Firefox is or isnt set as the default browser wouldn't have any impact on it.

If it displays same behaviour under Windows with an up-to-date internet explorer on there, then chances are you'll have an easier time with Amazon support in terms of having them get to the bottom of the uploading problem.

If you right click on the ISO file on your desktop and choose 'get info' then that should confirm the file is under 4.6GB and has .ISO (or .iso) at the end of the name (though I'd expect Amazon to provide a more obvious error message if either filename or filesize was the underlying issue)

 

[GeoRW]

Almost...

The thing will not go into my otherwise empty Gorilla USB 16 gig stick... for somereason an unexpected error occurs ... only my 3 terrabyte Hard Drive named the GORGE would take it. It is 4.44 GB according to the picture below.

 

[snorkelman]

looks like you've done a get info on the 'mounted' version of the iso (OSX automatically mounts ISO files as 'virtual drives' when you double click on the .iso file)

The 'mounted' one is the white removable disk drive icon one in your get info

The actual iso file itself is the white icon with folded corner and image of a grey metal hard disk (the one with a pink box around it in my attachment below)

Worth dragging the mounted version to your trash (that'll 'eject' it)

With the mounted one out of the way, have another try with the Amazon upload choosing the .iso file (though that's more in hope than expectation)

Re the file not copying to your 16GB stick - chances are your 16GB USB thumbdrive is formatted as FAT32, FAT32 has a file-size limit of 4GB for any individual file; it just can't store a 4.4GB file.

If you really want to get the 4.4GB ISO file onto the 16GB stick (as opposed to taking your 3TB drive to the Windows machine at the library) then the 16GB stick needs reformatted as EX-FAT rather than FAT32 and that might be easier to do on a Windows machine.

EX-FAT can cope with individual files that are larger than 4GB

Does mean two trips to library though; one to format the 16GB stick as EX-FAT, and second trip to take the .iso file along to library on that now EX-FAT formatted stick

 

[GeoRW]

And again, I appreciate this!

Well, the actual curled paper edge one did not load, as you predicted that it might not. So I have to go down to the Library...

When I stick the gorilla 16 GB into the windows USB thing, how do I go from FAT32 to EX-FAT?

I REALLY don't speak PC, at all!!!

Thanks!

Geo

 

[dangerfish]

You can reformat your thumb drive on your Mac. No need to go to the library.
http://youtu.be/na9dLlYNFOs

 

[GeoRW]

Eureka!!!!

That worked great! Thanks! The IOS thingy at 4.44 Gigs is LOADINGG!!!! I greatly appreciate that!!!

Thank you, Dangerfish!!

Geo

You can reformat your thumb drive on your Mac. No need to go to the library.
http://youtu.be/na9dLlYNFOs

 

[GeoRW]

Sooooo Close!!!!!

Well, Snorkleman. I think it will work. IF I HAVE eight hours at the library on a single computer. It was loading for an hour and a half when it shows 8% loaded. LOL! Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. The library closed and I had to abort...

 

[snorkelman]

Well, Snorkleman. I think it will work. IF I HAVE eight hours at the library on a single computer. It was loading for an hour and a half when it shows 8% loaded. LOL! Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. The library closed and I had to abort...

yeh that was my biggest concern - having folks upload an entire DVD image without access to superfast upload speeds did seem like a big ask on Amazons part

 

[GeoRW]

Thanks anyway!!

I do thank you, Snorkelman, for your efforts on my behalf... I am in communications with Amazon now to see what else can be done!! Do wish me luck!!

 

[snorkelman]

I do thank you, Snorkelman, for your efforts on my behalf... I am in communications with Amazon now to see what else can be done!! Do wish me luck!!

you're welcome George

Keeping my fingers crossed you get a sensible outcome from them