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Toast 9 Titanium - Blu-ray, Hurrah!

Toast 9 has more support for Blu-ray and HD-DVD burning than Toast 8 could handle. But it comes at a price; a $20 price, to be exact. Blu-ray and HD-DVD support are only available through a plug-in that is a separate purchase.

Toast 8 could burn Blu-ray data disks, but was unable to create Blu-ray video DVDs. With the new plug-in, Toast 9 can copy both data and HD video files.

What’s more, it can grab HD files from TiVo, EyeTV, or directly from an AVCHD camcorder.

Of course, if you haven’t purchased a third-party Blu-ray drive yet, you won’t have a destination for those beautiful HD files. Toast 9 provides an elegant solution to this dilemma, although this workaround may not suit everyone. You can burn HD files to a standard DVD, single- or double-layered, and it will work the same as a Blu-ray disc would in a Blu-ray player. The tradeoff with using a standard DVD is time; you’re limited to about 15 minutes of HD content when you burn to a standard DVD. This may be adequate for home HD movies you pull off your HD camera, but if you’re copying video from a source such as EyeTV or TiVo, you’re going to need a Blu-ray burner.

The Blu-ray/HD-DVD plug-in comes with 15 HD menu styles to help you put a professional polish on your HD recordings.

Toast 9 Titanium - Additional New Features

Toast 9 has additional new features that make it a must-have for video and audio enthusiasts.

One of my favorites is Toast’s improved ability to create DVD video compilations. Merging multiple DVD video folders is now a simple drag-and-drop process, unlike the multi-step process in previous versions.

Mac users will appreciate Toast’s support for El Gato’s EyeTV. With Toast 9, this partnership has gone a step further. Toast 9 can recognize the presence of El Gato's Turbo.264 video coprocessor and use it to speed up video conversions to the H.264 formats used by iPods, Apple TV, and Sony PSP.

Toast 9 also has a new ability to pause the video encoding process. Video encoding is one of the most CPU-intensive applications most of us will ever encounter. During encoding, some Macs will drag their feet if you try to simultaneously work in other applications. Now you can simply pause Toast while it’s encoding and free up CPU cycles for other tasks.

In addition to using El Gato’s hardware encoder, Toast also uses the video editor included with EyeTV, allowing you to edit your video material. It’s not a sophisticated editor by any means, but it allows you to remove commercials from shows you record.

Last but not least on the video compression and encoding improvement front: Before you commit to a long encoding process, you can preview the post-encoding video, which saves time and helps ensure that you’ve chosen the appropriate encoding settings.

Toast 9 Titanium - Streamer

Streamer is the newest standalone application that Roxio added to Toast. As its name implies, it allows you to use your Mac to stream video over the Internet (or your network) to other Macs or PCs, as well as an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Streaming content is hosted by Roxio; you’ll need to set up a free streaming account before you can take advantage of this feature. Once you’ve created your account, the URL for your streaming videos will be: http://streamer.roxio.com/your-account-name.

Streamer is a tool for preparing video files for streaming. If the files haven’t already been optimized for Internet use, Streamer will re-encode the files and automatically list them at your streaming account URL. Simply go to the URL and click on one of the videos in the list to start streaming playback of that video.

Roxio doesn’t store the video on its web site, so your Mac must be on. You’ll also need a fairly fast Internet connection for streaming to be effective. If you meet these requirements, you can travel the world and watch a video that is stored on your Mac at home.

Toast 9 Titanium - Wrap Up

Toast 9 Titanium is a video and audio toolbox that can single-handedly perform many functions that used to require separate applications. With its new ability to convert files to multiple formats, batch convert files, and author Blu-ray discs, Toast has become my go-to application for video authoring.

Oh, and it can burn CDs, too.

My only real disappointment with Toast 9 is that the Blu-ray/HD-DVD plug-in is an added-cost option. Otherwise, the cons I’ve discovered while using the application over the past two weeks have been minor, and may well be more a matter of my preferred methods of working than any failing of Toast.

Toast 9 Titanium deserves serious consideration as your main application for burning CDs and DVDs, and working with video and audio projects.

4 1/2 stars

Reviewer's Notes

• A review copy of Toast Titanium 9 was provided by Roxio.
• The review was performed on a 3 GHz 4-core Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM.
• Toast 9 requires OS X 10.4.x or later and a Mac with a G4 or later processor.
• Blu-ray and HD-DVD authoring require a separate, added-cost plug-in (currently $20).