Toast 6 Mac

The most impressive of Toast 6's improvements involves video. Toast 5 could encode video files to MPEG-1 format and burn them to Video CD (VCD). But Toast 6 adds MPEG-2 encoding, which lets Toast create a Super Video CD (SVCD) or a DVD, with simple menus, from any video format that QuickTime understands. Now that Toast can author a DVD, users with external DVD burners -- which iDVD doesn't support -- can create DVDs, and quick DVD creation is now easier for everyone. Toast 6 can even take an MPEG-1 file -- which has audio and video multiplexed into a single track -- and create a DVD from it at the click of a button.

The new Plug & Burn feature lets you capture video from a DV camcorder and burn it to VCD, SVCD, or DVD. In our tests, it captured and burned an SVCD of footage from a Canon Optura 20 DV camcorder flawlessly. Toast encoded 5 minutes of video in about 14 minutes on a dual-867MHz Power Mac G4 at high quality. (The program gives only high or standard video-quality options, with no indication of bit rates, so you can't fine-tune your compression.) Toast gives you basic trimming functionality for files; when burning, you can choose to insert chapter markers either at timed intervals or at scene breaks.

We were annoyed by Toast's lack of progress bars to indicate the time remaining for encoding video or burning data DVDs -- the two most time-consuming uses of such an application. Also, for drives that burn to both DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW, buffer-underrun protection isn't currently supported. This should be fixed by the time you read this.