why is Toast so slow?

[mberndt100]

OK I have 5 11-minute avi files which I wanted to put on a DVD. I used ffmpegX to convert them all to mpeg-2 with ac3 sound. The encoding was fine and went fairly quickly.

I wanted to have a basic menu to choose between the 5 videos so I used the video option in Toast. I chose DVD-Video, High Quality since the videos only totaled 55 minutes, and Create DVD menu.

Toast says "MPEG and Dolby Digital Audio will reamin unchanged." So I figured the videos were processed correctly. So when I hit the Big Red Start Button I was expecting it to just make a Video_TS folder and pop out a DVD. But now 6 hours later it's still encoding the videos.

So my question is: Does anyone know why?

[Frobozz]

Toast found that the MPEG video did not meet DVD specs and is re-encoding it (presuming you're using a version of Toast later than 6.0.1). What settings did you use for the MPEG encoding in ffmpegX? I'm presuming you created separate .m2v and .ac3 streams, right?

Also, don't bother with the High Quality setting in Toast. You won't see a difference except with videos that have lots of action, and only with videos in which Toast is doing the MPEG encoding (which inadvertently it is doing to yours).

Addendum: I just realized that you say the ffmpeg encoding went quickly. In that case, you didn't encode MPEG 2. It never goes quickly. Also, why didn't you just drag the AVI's to Toast in the first place and let it do the encoding?

Whatever process you did, Toast is trying to make it right. Let us know how it turns out.

[terryj]

First let me do my Nelson Impersonation:

ha!ha!



ok, not chewing you out for NOT doing a forum search, but
Everything, EVERYTHING, must be in Quicktime compliant spec
for things to work/go fast/encode quickly in Toast 6.xx.

Unlike ffmepgx, which has four different engines to choose
from when encoding its output, Toast ONLY relies on one,
and that is Quicktime. And to quote an obscure line:
"Quicktime is a harsh mistress....indeed."

You would have been better off if you took the 5 avi files,
opened them in QT Pro, edited them down into one
Quicktime Movie, and then Dragged that into the Toast window,
and let Toast author.
Audio would have been in AIFF spec,
Video would have been Quicktime Compliant,
and you'd be talking now about
how great the DVD is, instead of waiting on Toast to
re-encode whatever it is Quicktime doesn't like.
(you can find out what by looking in the Roxio Converted
Items folder on your mac)

[mberndt100]

In ffmpegX I used the "DVD" quick setting, giving me mpeg-2 video and ac3 audio. I just un-checkd the option to output a VIDEO_TS folder since I wanted toast to do it. I also chose not to keep the elementary streams.

2 of the videos were 640x480 and 3 of them were 512x whatever. I did not change the resolution of the videos.

So I can assume it's re-encoding them up to 720x ? If I had left the video quality on normal would it have skipped this process?

[mberndt100]

So the DVD is finally done and it looks good, sounds good.

I think what the problem was, as terryj put it, was the video was not QT-compliant. I used the ffmpeg MPEG-2 encoder. And by fast I meant 10-15 minutes for each 11-min. video. That's not REALLY fast, but fairly fast in my opinion.

The 5 m2v files did show up in the Converted items folder.

So (for next time) if I choose the mpeg2enc Encoder in ffmpegX will I still face the same problem?

The only reason I did it this way in the first place was because I wanted the menu.

thanks for the advice!

[Frobozz]

I'm guessing the m2v created by ffmpeg was not 720X480 or other DVD-spec resolution. Click the What is DVD link at the top left of this page to see the supported resolutions. Many AVI's get encoded at bizarre resolutions. Maybe ffmpeg didn't rescale the video to a supported resolution during its MPEG encoding.

When you say you wanted the menu, what menu are you referring to? Unless you are burning a VIDEO_TS folder with Toast you're going to get the Toast menu.

[mberndt100]

yeah I just wanted the simple Toast menu. I don't know of any easier way to make a DVD with a menu, aside from iDVD, and I didn't feel like messing with that.

[alph]

Just some odds and ends

Check the DVD specs
https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

Make sure you have the latest version of FFMPEGX and Toast. Toast 6.0.9 is far more flexible about what it accepts.

The best way to make sure Toast accepts your mpeg2/ac3 files is to "Demux as headed m2v and ac3" using MPEG Streamclip before adding them into the Toast video tab. When you add the .m2v file toast finds the associated ac3 file on it's own, or asks for it. The "demux as headed mpeg" feature of 1.2 does not seem to work as well, at least in my experience.

Alph