creating DVDs

[iryskel]

Hello again.

I have several avi video clips on my hard drive and as they are taking up quite a lot of space i thought i'd transfer them to dvd's. I tried using Toast Titanium 7.0 to do this as i wanted them to be readable on my regular dvd-player. To do this, i selected the create dvd option, but oddly found that although the clips are only a few hundred MB's (about 300 MB) in size, i could only fit one such clip onto a dvd which should be able to hold about 4.2GB. Could anybody help me out with this please?

thank you!

 

[Ric]

Hi there,

I have just tried it in Toast 7.0.2 with no problem ?

In the bottom right hand corner next to the big red record button does it say DVD or CD ?

regards

Ric

 

[iryskel]

hi Ric,

thanks for your help. it still doesn't seem to work for me. i tried burning a few clips where the total size adds up to 2.95GB, but i get an error message where it says that 11.18GB are required and only 4.38Gb are available (i've attached a screen capture). So I removed clips till i had a total file size of about 1GB which seems to work (I am trying to burn it right now). Is this the maximum i should be able to put on a dvd? How big was the file you were able to put on the dvd?

best,

 

[iryskel]

hi.

so it took really long to burn that dvd - i started at 11:45pm last night, at 2:30 am it wasn't even half-way through....

 

[Cory Cooper]

I think the isssues you are running into are caused by Toast actually coverting your files from AVI to an actual format (MPEG-2) that can be read/played by a regular DVD player. This on-the-fly conversion of video and audio can take a very long time...depending on your Mac's specs, OS version, and version of Toast.

That is one explanation of the out of space error and the extremely long burn time. In addition, your screen shot shows the total running time of the DVD to be 7 hours, 4 minutes, 59 seconds. That's almost three times the capacity of a single-layer DVD...of course dependent on the bit rate and other factors.

C

 

[iryskel]

Hi Cory,

Yeah, i did notice that the run time seems to be very high. It's just weird because the total file size i had was 2.95GB which is about 1GB less than what a DVD should be able to hold. In the end I was able to put 1GB on the DVD and even though I understand that conversion to another format could cause an increase in the file size/require more space than the original file size, I didn't think the difference would be this large. So I wonder if that is normal?

As for conversion to another format, is there any other software (preferably freeware, hehe) I could use to convert the files to an appropriate format before I transfer it to the DVD using toast?

thank you for your help!