we finished our West Wing boxed set last night.
I do have [cough] series 7 up to date, but it was in AVI files that someone had kindly sent me on DVDs, and we really don’t like watching television up here in the study, and have no means at the moment of putting computery stuff through a television.
so I set to tonight to transfer the AVIs onto a DVD format that would play downstairs. Some googling informed that I could do it with Toast, which is great – I got Toast. but oh my word, isn’t it *slow* to do this …
despite much chivvying along, this usually quite nippy dual 2.5Ghz Mac took bloody ages to do the first three, to the point where we were reduced to watching *something else* while we consumed supper (goulash, since you ask).
at 10 p.m., I popped in here to see if the DVD was written; it was, I tested it on this machine and it was fine, so whipped it downstairs to the televisual stack to try. And it worked there too – how we managed to watch just *one* episode I have no idea. Currently converting and burning the next three.
I’m going to miss it *so* much when it’s over.
Converting video can be very processor intensive – I’ve just put together a dual-processor machine mostly for this very task. I don’t know if Toast will use both processors, but from my limited experience I’m amazed that you got Toast to do anything useful, and I’m surprised that your first DVD worked first time. Perhaps Macs are more useful than I imagined, or perhaps your DVD players are recent and/or highly compatible.
both processors were running flat out.
Toast Titanium on a Mac is very good – if one were to do it (which one wouldn’t, of course, as it would be Bad and Wrong), it would take a DVD which one had ripped with Mac the Ripper, and automatically compress it to fit on a DVD.
I’d just buy a DVD that can play .AVIs.
It looks like the chipset to do so is extremely cheap now – there are players that can do so, but don’t bother to say they can!
but I don’t *want* to buy a new DVD player for downstairs 🙂