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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Applications > Toast 7 & Popcorn

Toast 7 & Popcorn
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Markg
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Jul 5, 2006, 11:32 PM
 
I just bought Toast and Popcorn yesterday and not very happy with it.

With toast, I'm burning a dvd at 8x and it takes about 20 minutes to complete. Also, during the countdown to completion, it goes really slow. Like, it will start out at around 7 minutes and it takes around 3 seconds to drop down to the next second. i.e 7:00 minutes to 6:59 3 seconds later then 6:58 another 3 seconds later and so on...


With popcorn, I'm trying to put a 25 minute video (thats on my hard drive) into iPod format mp4. It took around 15-20 minutes to complete.


I switched over to windows ( on the same computer) and used nero recode2 and it completed the same video in 5 minutes.

I know in Windows if you have nero and roxio easy media creater (same company as toast) installed at the same time, you will have problems with those programs. Is it the same for Toast and Nero even though they are on different OS and different partitions???


Or am I just doing something wrong? Or just crappy software.
     
angelmb
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Jul 6, 2006, 05:00 AM
 
Have you got the Universal Toast 7.1 and PopCorn 2.0 versions ?

-I guess you have an intel Mac-
     
Markg  (op)
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Jul 6, 2006, 12:17 PM
 
yeah they're universal
     
Landos Mustache
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Jul 6, 2006, 01:06 PM
 
Why do you need both? Toast has popcorn built in.

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Markg  (op)
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Jul 6, 2006, 01:58 PM
 
Because I wanted to convert movies to iPod format which I dont think you can do in Toast.



I got a refund for both programs and will stick to switching operating systems for Nero.
     
Landos Mustache
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Jul 6, 2006, 02:30 PM
 
Was the export quality exactly the same for both Toast and the PC app?

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Markg  (op)
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Jul 6, 2006, 02:43 PM
 
Yeah it was more or less the same quality. Both turned out to be around 150mb from the source 1500mb.
     
King Bob On The Cob
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Jul 6, 2006, 03:35 PM
 
Originally Posted by Markg
Yeah it was more or less the same quality. Both turned out to be around 150mb from the source 1500mb.
Well, if Popcorn used H.264 (much better quality per kbps) it does take roughly 4x as long to encode. File size isn't all that matters, even if Popcorn did use MPEG-4, perhaps it did two pass encoding or spent longer keyframing. I bet if Popcorn took longer, it spat out a better looking file.
     
angelmb
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Jul 6, 2006, 04:41 PM
 
Originally Posted by Markg
Because I wanted to convert movies to iPod format which I dont think you can do in Toast.
What kind of movies?, there are some free and/or shareware apps that let you do it so.
     
Cadaver
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Jul 6, 2006, 06:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by angelmb
What kind of movies?, there are some free and/or shareware apps that let you do it so.
Yep. iSquint works quite well. And its pretty fast for me encoding to MP4. And free.

H.264 encoding is very slow on any machine. Very mathematically intense. The quality is fantastic, but on an iPod's screen, there's little point (IMHO).

And, yes, you can install Nero on the WinXP partition and continue to use Toast on the Mac side without problem.

By the way, I have no such problems with Toast 7.1 at all. Didn't have them with the pre-Universal Binary version of Toast, either, to be honest.
     
Markg  (op)
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Jul 6, 2006, 06:30 PM
 
King, You may be right about the 2 passes. I didnt even think about that because I have that option turned off in Nero. If that is it, is there a way to turn that off as I cant find the option.


Angelmb, they're dvd movies. What programs are there?
     
Cadaver
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Jul 6, 2006, 06:39 PM
 
Originally Posted by Markg
King, You may be right about the 2 passes. I didnt even think about that because I have that option turned off in Nero. If that is it, is there a way to turn that off as I cant find the option.


Angelmb, they're dvd movies. What programs are there?
Handbrake
Handbrake Lite
DVD2Pod
ffmpegX
     
Markg  (op)
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Jul 6, 2006, 08:18 PM
 
Thanks cadaver

I D/L handbrake and so far it looks good.
     
angelmb
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Jul 7, 2006, 03:20 AM
 
What Cadaver told you, HandBrake is awesome, check this out:

http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide

there is also "Instant HandBrake" kinda like a HandBrake little brother… even easier, a couple of mouse clics and you are done.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/
     
   
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