On Oct 27, 2004, at 07:31, Michael Winter wrote: > On Oct 26, 2004, at 7:17 PM, Robert L. Vaessen wrote: > >> Will toast do authoring, encoding of DVD project? Or, is it only for >> burning data that is ready for disc? >> >> What is the input to Toast? > > Toast will do the encoding for you. So you can drag just about > anything you can view (dv, mpg, avi -but not asf, wmv) into Toast and > it will do the encoding for you. You just select wether you want DVD, > VCD, SVD.... For basic "i just want to get this on disk" type stuff it > works fine. The problem is you're pretty much stuck with the way Toast > does buttons and their background image (I've read there's a hack to > change the background image). IOW no way to customize the interface. > Toast will also do slide shows and combinations of slide shows and > video with the same limitations -little control over the interface. > > I know there are all kinds of tools available to create different > parts of the project and just use Toast to burn the finished VIDEO_TS > folder, but I haven't messed with them. Mike - I tried to burn the Tutorial again. It didn't work. The attempt to burn failed at stage 2. The burn icon began freewheeling after about 10 minutes, I let it run for about 10 more minutes, then I tried to cancel with no effect. There was no disk activity, the CPU usage had dropped considerably, the burn icon was spinning at a rather constant rate, and there was no audible disk activity. I had to force quit the application. Cancel and Quit had no effect. I tried to burn edit, author, encode and burn some unrelated video. I captured some video using my iSight camera and QuickTime Broadcast. I imported the QuickTime-4 encoded video into iMovie, added a still image, a title, a transition and three chapter markers. I exported that test video to iDVD (pressed the 'Create iDVD project' button). Once in iDVD I quit iMovie, added some music and transitions to the iDVD menu. When I tried to burn the project, my computer locked up completely in stage 2. I had to power cycle it in order to get it working again. I tried to encode and burn the tutorial .mov file using ffmpegx. Using ffmpegx is a rather complex process. ffmpegx is a scary beast. After numerous failed attempts (from not knowing/understanding how to use ffmpegx), I've actually had some success. ffmpegx uses two different programs/processes in order to complete the video encoding process. One process/program is ffmpeg (I'm not exactly sure what codec it's using), the other process/program is mpeg2enc. Whenever I use the ffmpeg program/process to encode the video, the process fails at the authoring stage (muxing audio and video files together and putting them into a VIDEO_TS folder). When I use the mpeg2enc program/process, I achieve partial success. I'm able to create a valid DVD folder, containing VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. Unfortunately, the .VOB file (Multiplexed video/audio) does not contain any audio. ffmpegx looks promising. I've successfully create a DVD folder. The folder contains the components (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS) that go onto a DVD. Hopefully, I can tweak ffmpegx until I get video and audio. Then I can use the finder to burn the data to a DVD. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a trial version of Toast. I'd hate to buy an $100 program, only to find that it won't encode and burn my video projects. This problem is really vexing me. It's the only software application I'm having a problem with. - Robert