[kyles_mac]

Hello everyone,

I am looking to backup some of my DVDs, especially some of the DVDs my friends have given me of some of our short films and what-not. But instead of buying Toast to create a VCD-playable disk, I was hoping to find a free program that would do the same that Toast does when it comes to VCDs.

Or something even better, is there an alternative way to create VCDs other than using FFMpeg (or whatever it's called) and then using Toast. What I have been doing is using Handbrake to create the avi file.


So if anyone can offer me some help, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks a lot!

[jamil5454]

Hmm... you should try green eggs and ham. Sorry, had to.

Are you looking to backup your DVDs or create VCDs, or both?

iLife is pretty powerful for that type of stuff.

[MRTrauffer]

In my opinion, Toast is definitely worth its price. It's been an extremely valuable tool in my library, and has been very reliable. I honestly wouldn't settle for anything else.

[kyles_mac]

Well, my idea was to save myself some money and not buy a dvd burner for now, and create backups of my dvds by making them vcds.

But I am beginning to assume I can't get around not dropping some money and since it would probably be better in the long run, I am just going to buy a DVD burner, and the one I am looking at comes with Toast.

Is it agreed that that is the best way to approach this?

[MRTrauffer]

I think so. If you think about it in the long run, you can back up a lot more data to a dvd than a cd. Plus you'd get a better quality video on a dvd.

And with the price of blank dvds being so cheap lately, I think the burner would prove to be a worthwhile investment.

[kyles_mac]

Thanks a lot. I actually ordered a LaCie Firewire External DVD Burner. I appreciate all the help. And it wasn't that expensive either, so I am pumped to give it a try.

Thanks again for the help.

[peeb]

What's the advantage of toast over iLife?

[Uncle Skeleton]

A fundamental property of software is the trade-off between simplicity (aka ease of use, or hiding complexity from the user) and flexibility (aka options, or exposing complexity to the user). iApps are heavily skewed towards simplicity (except for iTunes which is the one iApp that has a nice balance), and Toast has many more features (but still a very elegant and simple interface, the loss of which is usually one of the main hazards of taking the flexibility route). Some examples off the top of my head are being able to burn DVDs without re-encoding, burning data without waiting for the software to copy to a temporary partition first (I don't actually know if iApps still do this, but they did for a disgustingly long time), the option of what file system to burn the disc as (not to mention using the whole disc instead of wasting 10% of it on god knows what like the Finder does), native support for every drive on the market, and VCD authoring (and a damn good MPEG-1 encoder).