Saturday, March 29, 2008

Hi-def disc creation improved in Toast 9.0.2

Just in time to mark the dissolution of the HD DVD Promotion Group, Roxio has released Toast Titanium v9.0.2. With this new update, my HD DVD creation problems are now partially fixed.

I was able to create an HD DVD using the default "Best Automatic" setting using some of the clips that were problematic before, and the disc plays in both a Toshiba standalone HD DVD player and in Apple's DVD Player application. However, I was still unable to create the same disc using a custom 20 Mbps H.264 encoding setting. With this setting, the disc creation fails with a -50 Error. The discs that do work still don't work in my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, as I cannot navigate beyond the menu on that player. However, as I mentioned before, this may in part be due to the player itself.

Apparently some of the Blu-ray problems have been fixed too. Roxio states that Toast 9.0.2:
* Resolves a number of encoding issues related to high-definition source content and creation of Blu-ray video discs
* Resolves situation where high-definition DVDs would not play back on PlayStation 3
However, I have not yet tested Blu-ray creation as I do not own a Blu-ray player, and Apple's DVD Player does not support Blu-ray.