Toast Disappears and I am Mystified

[Nacus]

I have a friend with G5 Mac desktop with 10.3.9/QT 7.5 and Toast 7.1.3. For a long time now, he has been a happy camper with this set up. But about a month ago, Toast started disappearing during the encoding phase of burning a DVD. It just disappears then reappears, empty. I have run Applejack, Tech Tools Pro and Disk Warrior, as well as upgrade QT to 7.5 (from some 7.1 version, I believe) so far and that has helped. He now only has this problem when he tries to burn a disk with large files of mixed origin: specifically, for example, when he tries to burn a DVD made from a 600 meg .avi and a 600 meg .mpg. Toast always will encode the .avi, then disappear when it has to deal with the .mpg.

What could be causing this, especially after such a long time (a couple of years, I believe) of happy DVD burning?

[albloom]

You're talking a memory and HD intensive chore. How much
HD space is free on that G5?

[guns1inger]

600 MB files are not large file, and converting them to DVD on a G5 while not being a fast exercise, should not tax it that much. You should have at least 10GB free for the exercise though.

[Nacus]

Thanks guys. I did not think to look in to that. I will check it out and get back to you. The guys on Roxio and Apple forums have other opinions. Apple thinks its permissions. Roxio thinks it's corrupt preferences. I have just learned that Toast uses Quicktime to decode the video and then its own MPEG 2 encoder to encode, which seems interesting , since it breaks when finishing the encode of one file and beginning the next. I am also thinking of using a tool called Pacifist to force replace the MPEG component of Quicktime, but am not sure that would be a good idea yet. Any opinions?

[Nacus]

Hey guys. I just found out that the machine has 68 gig free. So he has plenty of free HD.


I think I am going to do this:

Repair permissions and trash toast Prefs and test.

If that doesn't fix it, use Pacifist to completely reinstall QT 7.5, and test.

If that doesn't fix it, I will probably have to re-install the OS.

That is all I can see as options at this point.

[KeepItSimple]

have you tried Onyx?

[Nacus]

Well, it took me long enough (work has been taxing), but I have some more information. First, I have a section of the Toast crash report:

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00010004

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 libSystem.B.dylib 0x90001f40 szone_calloc + 0xe4
1 libSystem.B.dylib 0x90002888 malloc_zone_calloc + 0xc4
2 libSystem.B.dylib 0x90003258 calloc + 0x4c

Does anyone know what libSystem.B.dylib is?

[pixel zombie]

see if running Mac HelpMate fixes the problem..i also used to use Toast to convert avi's but i got tired of error messages that i could never decipher..i now use VisualHub & MPEG2 Works 4 to convert all my files beforehand and only use toast to make simple menus and for burning...

[terryj]

I have seen this before. Toast uses Quicktime to decode and encode files
to DVD. Toast will flip out like this if it encounters files it cannot handle:
a video stream it doesn't have a decoder for, an audio stream it doesn't
have a decoder for.

The solution is simple:
Have your friend make sure he installs the following codecs into
his system:

Perian ( Free)
Quicktime Mpeg-2 ($20)
Toast's DIVX component. ( Free, comes with Toast)

Have him try the files again.

If the files fail again, he'll need to take them outside of Toast,
like pix suggested, and use a converter to convert them to
DV Stream, which is the most plain vanilla file type that both
Toast and Quicktime like, and can process the fastest and easiest.

for this, you can use:
ffmpegx ( $15)
VisualHub ($24)
Mpegstreamclip ( $20 for QT Mpeg-2 Component)