Experiences on going from Toast 6.0x to 6.0.9...

[Booger]

Just wanted to get some opinions on those that have updated from Toast 6.05/6.07 to 6.0.9.

I've read some people have had registration issues, but I'm more interested to hear if anybody has had any performance problems.

Any weird problems/experiences (especially as it relates to backing up DVD's)?

Cheers!

[thecat]

I didn't see any changes, either good or bad. I only use Toast to burn data and DVDs tough, I don't use the more advanced fonctions (video encoding, etc).

[sjk]

Something might have changed in how Toast 6.0.9 processes SVCD-compatible 480x480 MPEG-2 files exported from EyeTV that are burned as DVD-Video. Pretty sure I remember older versions re-encoding those files and significantly increased their size. That, and my set-top player having trouble with SVCD playback, is why I switched to 720x480 MPEG-2 EyeTV recordings.

A few days ago I burned a DVD-Video with six MPEG-2 files; two of them were older SVCD-sized leftovers. Toast did some sort of audio demuxing but seemed to leave the video untouched, which made processing time faster. Later, when I tested playback on my set-top box the video for those two files was "left-shifted" (uncentered) on my 4:3 TV, with a black bar filling about a 1/4 of the right side of the screen. With DVD Player and VLC all video is centered on my 20" iMac display (as expected).

I don't mind burning a few remaining older recordings that'll have funky left-shifted TV playback since it's more efficient than re-encoding them at 720x480 with degraded quality which uses more space and takes more time. And I can watch those few exceptions on the computer if TV playback bothers me.

Anyway, I don't understand that behavior (yet) since I didn't think a 480x480 file could remain at that resolution on a DVD-Video format disk, and don't have an older version of Toast handy to double-check it's really a change with 6.0.9. Does anyone have an explanation?

[Case]

It looks like your set-top player is not compatible with SVCD-on-DVD, framesize wise. Just like my Pioneer. The DVD standard doesn't require players to handle it, but some of the cheaper players seem to handle it anyway.

[sjk]

Playback of SVCD-on-CD with my Pioneer DV-C503 has an unwatchable "mirrored" video effect so I was surprised that it handles SVCD-on-DVD more acceptably. And I didn't know SVCD-on-DVD was possible although after reading your helpful post (thanks) I've noticed there's a special DVD-SVCD format. I'd expected Toast would reencode it with a standard DVD resolution but am glad that it doesn't.