Blu-ray recording on mac?
 

I tried using search, but it's down for maintenance right now. So, I'll post.

I need to look into internal blu-ray burners for my mac pro 8-core. I'm seeing some that say Mac-compatible, but very few, and more expensive. It seems that most bd burners out there are for Windows only. Now, I've heard from a few people that the reason they are windows only is that windows can play blu-ray movies and mac cannot. I don't care about playing movies, I just want to burn bd data discs and movie discs. I've also heard from others that unless it says it's mac compatible, it won't work for anything on a mac.

So, would I be able to buy any blu-ray burner to just burn movies and data on my mac?

Sure. Read this. Make sure you read Part Two too!

Thanks very much for the links! They helped a lot. I see now that likely any drive will work with Toast installed, because neither of the drives Ken Stone recommends say Mac compatible. The compatibility issue must just be that Mac won't play blu-ray movies.

Again, thanks!

Absolutely! The drive manufacturers not only ignore Macs, but they also usually state ONLY that their drives are "Windows Compatible". They all (nearly all?) work with Macs, though.

There is, of course, never any Mac software bundled with the drives - you need Toast 9/10 + BD Plug-in for that, but then you're good to go!

I'm 99% ready to dive into this, and have one quick question. The current version of Toast now 10, and it's available in Titanium and Titanium Pro. Both are supposed to author BD video discs, but the "Pro" version looks to have a bunch of other multimedia programs included. Are any of these worth the extra cash, or can I stick with regular Toast 10 Titanium?

Jason, you don't need Toast 10 Pro for Blu-ray production. Toast 10 (Amateur!) will do.

However, you DO need the "BD Plug-in" that is another $10 or so for download.

However, however, when I ordered Toast 10 (non-Pro) and before it was delivered, I ordered/paid for/downloaded the BD Plug-in, and then found the retail Toast 10 package had the BD Plug-in bundled as a free gift! Thanks, Roxio!

So: The moral of the story is: get your Toast 10 package first, and THEN see if you need to buy the BD Plug-in!

You don't need a blu-ray recorder to make blu-ray discs on your Mac. No kidding:

MacVideo - DVD Authoring - Features - Bruce Nazarian shows how to produce affordable Blu-ray

I now understand why ppl don't choose internal with a mac. I have a power mac which only has one opening for a drive (even though its a tower), which would mean I'd have to swap internal drives every time I wanted to burn a BR. And then you can't even test it because you can't play BR in a Mac. What a joke.

What about authoring menus? Will Toast do this as well or is another software like Encore suggested for this?

Toast will do simple menus that (as far as I know) you cannot edit. You can pick from a selection of templates, but I don't think you can edit them other than chapter point titles and such. Someone correct me if that's wrong because I don't have Toast v10, only v9, and I don't know for sure they didn't change that.

With Encore, you can create your own menus or edit the existing templates like you can in DVD Studio Pro.

Dan is correct about Toast.

So would you rank Toast as about as useful (flexible) as iDVD for the BR creation?

Thanks for the info about Toast. I guess I will have to look into Encore unless anyone else has a good experience with another software. By the way...can you buy Encore separately or do you have to by it in one of the bundles? I don't see it anywhere for sale separately.

I'm pretty sure you have to buy it in a bundle, which stinks. I have seen some bundled software for sale individually on ebay, but I wouldn't trust that source.

You don't have to buy the Adobe's Premium or Master collection. Adobe Encore DVD is part of Premiere Pro, that can bought seperately.

Ivan - Thanks for the info and you are right. I was depressed that I would have to pay so much for the collection but now I can sleep peacefully :)

Calling them simple menus is a bit of an understatement. The menus in Toast make iDVD look like Scenarist by comparison. The BD quality, despite the long encode time, is very, very nice. Too bad the whole package is compromised by ugly menus and randomly placed chapter menus.

We are using the "Toast" method at this point and we don't do any menu with the Blu-ray version of the video. We also have Toast automatically add a chapter point every 5 minutes.

I think that's how I'm going to do it too. The menus I tried didn't work very well on my Sony BDP350 player. Might pop over to the windows side of things and try the Powerproducer software that came with the drive.

Well, I've burned a few more test BDs with Toast, and I'm not very encouraged at all. I'm getting what looks like field order problems. Objects with vertical likes that are moving horizontally give a terrible stuttering effect. The faster the object, the worse it gets. I know the limitations of HDV when it comes to fast motion, but this is far worse. The original footage (from an XHA1) does not exhibit this problem. The video was captured and edited in FCP, then exported as a standalone movie. Toast is doing all the encoding, as I only have FCS 1, and that version of Compressor is worthless for HD stuff.

Any theories on why the reviews of Toast 10 on Amazon are about 50% "it's the best Mac software" and 50% "it's the worst Mac software"?

Unusual to see mostly the two extremes represented. Is it likely the negative people are doing something wrong or using something incompatible with it?

My guess would be the negative reviews come from people with older machines or insufficient RAM. it's a good program overall, but a real memory hog. Burning DVDs on a mini with 512MB of RAM would be quite painful.

I know the menu options for Blu Ray are limited. Is there at least a very simple, minimal menu in there? Maybe just a plain list of chapters?