can't burn DVD with Toast or iDVD3 :evil:

[budala66]

This was one of those weekends where I wanted to pull a sledgehammer out and kill my Mac. I’ve been a Mac lover for 15 years now but am getting tired of all the problems. I just bought iDVD3 and the latest Toast for my G3 B&W that's got a G4/500 brain, 856mb RAM and a Pioneer DVR-106 4x DVD drive. I’ve used the drive to burn CDs and DVDs before with Finder and Burnz but never for burning video DVDs. [The reason I have to use iDVD3 is my G4/500 is too “old” for iDVD4 – you need a G4/733 for iDVD4 to work.]

I plugged in my MiniDV camera and loaded up a 1 hour 3 minute tape of my beautiful baby using iMovie (the latest one – don’t know if maybe I should be using the older version that came with iLife 3?). Then I went into iDVD and selected a basic menu and started the burn process. Just wanted to make a straight dupe of the tape onto DVD – I didn’t add titles or effects. How come it can’t be like in the Apple ads where you’re mailing DVDs of your fabulous ski vacation off to your friends?

Started burning and after 2 hours of encoding - the bar progress was barely one-fifth of the way up ! ! Is this for real - that's 10-12 hours to make a one hour DVD?! I’m on a G4 – not an LC! I had to shut the computer off - there's no way this can be right and if it is then what’s the point of even having the ability to edit on Mac?

I tried again with a small video .mov file - 3:41 long and using different media – Maxell and JVC. It looked like it was working but then I got the following error. [By the way - it took more than 30 mins for Toast to encode it.]
The drive reported an error:
Sense Key = ILLEGAL REQUEST
Sense Code = 0x21, 0x02
BUFFER UNDERRUN
BURNING THE DISC FAILED BECAUSE THIS TYPE OF CD IS not supported. Error code 0x80020043

Bottom line – have tried to burn short clips from both Toast and iDVD3 several times with different brands and all I get are $1 coasters that my 2 year old can play with. Posted this over at roxio.com and someone replied that 10 hours was reasonable for a one hour program – doesn’t sound at all reasonable to me. [How come my Toshiba DVD/HDD recorder deck can burn that DVD almost immediately?]

I read the thread at apple.com about all the problems with i(mpossible)DVD4 and I also pulled out my non-Apple RAM and disconnected Firewire devices and got rid of Prefs– did nothing.

If Apple made a car. . . let's hope they don't.
G3 with G4/500; Mac OS X (10.3.x)

[harvid]

Well, it might be a little long for iDVD 3, but not out of the question. Some of the sites I did a quick bit of research on have people with G5 2GHz dualies encoding 1.5 hours of video in about two hours. So if that high end a machine takes that long, then I would suspect that an upgraded G3 B&W might take that long.

Any machine that does this with software MPEG-2 encoding would be taking that long, regardless if it were an upgraded PC of the same vintage or your Mac. If you want to do rapid MPEG-2 encoding, then you should look into a hardware encoding solution with a dedicated processor to handle the encoding (I have an eyeTV 200, and this works well for this purpose, though you would still need Toast for the final burn; however, I have only used MPEG-1 encoding with this box, other than TV recordings that I do in MPEG-2). Dedicated hardware encoding is why a DVD-recorder does its job so quickly. That said, MPEG-2 isn't as easy to edit after the ecoding process.

Just out of curiosity, what version of Toast are you using?

[budala66]

Thanks for your help! Toast is 6.0.3 - guess I'll have to save my money for a G5. Until then it'll be easier to just use my DVD deck to record my DV tapes.