[MacDV] Can't render/encode my iDVD project - Can't burn project to DVD

[Robert L. Vaessen]

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