Friday, March 21, 2008

Further Roxio Toast 9 HD DVD testing: Incompatibilities

I've been doing some more testing of Toast 9's HD DVD creation and have run into a few more issues:

1) I mentioned before that H.264 encoding doesn't work. This continues to be the case.

2) Even with MPEG2 sources, Toast 9 sometimes crashes when making an HD DVD, albeit infrequently. The good news is that Toast 9.0 is more stable than Toast 8.0 was.

3) With MPEG2 sources, even if Toast 9 finishes the burn process, the disc may lock up in certain parts of the video. This is not a media problem, because even if I save the image to the hard disk, playback will lock up in the exact same spot. If I do burn the image to disc, playback will stop in the same spot on both my Toshiba standalone as well as in DVD Player.app on my iMac. However, if I start over and make a different encode with same source material, the resultant HD DVD may work fine.

4) My Xbox 360 HD DVD does not like these discs. The disc will load and go to the menu, but I cannot navigate out of the menu to play the content. I tried using both my Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 remote as well as the Xbox 360 controller.

I have not tested Blu-ray because I do not have any Blu-ray playback device at my disposal, and DVD Player.app does not work with Blu-ray. I will likely buy a Blu-ray player once there is a Profile 1.1/2.0 player below about $200-250, but I fear that may not be until 2009.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope you are e-mailing Rocio these comments so they are aware of the issue.

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

Roxio here. Thanks for checking out Toast 9. We picked up on your post. We’ve been tracking a couple of similar issues, which we are working to resolve. We’d like to work with you if possible and secure some of your source material to test. If you are willing, do you mind sending an email to ToastFeedback@roxio.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Patrick Nugent
Toast Product Manager

Eug said...

Message sent. Thanks Roxio, for following up on this.

Bryan said...

Hi Eug,

Did you ever resolve the issue with playing HD-DVD DVD-Rs burned by Toast 9 on your Xbox 360 HD-DVD player?

I've just purchased an AVCHD camcorder and Toast 9 and was hoping to do exactly this so I can view my movies on my Xbox360 HD-DVD player. I am seeing exactly the same problem you describe here (and in your AVSForum post). Any news from Roxio?