Burn your HD Movies to Blu-ray Disc using Toast Both iMovie and Final Cut Pro/Express can edit and export HD Video but, for whatever reasons, Apple has yet to release any corresponding media burning software, either on the consumer or “pro” level. At first, it was a matter of waiting until the “format wars” finished, and we figured out which way it was going to go. Now that Blu-ray seems to be victor, we’re still waiting on Apple. Until then, we need another solution. Adobe Encore (part of ) offers pro-level Blu-ray Disc editing, but has a price tag and a learning curve to match.
For those of us, though, who would like to play back our own HD movies on our home theater systems without hooking up our cameras, there is a much simpler - and much less expensive - option. Roxio Toast has long been the flagship of disc burning, often supporting drives that Apple’s native burning software did not. In more recent times, it has become a full suite of applications, including utilities to help import and clean up audio and photos, import and export TiVo recordings, and even label and catalog your discs. Of course, the basic ability to burn discs remains.
From common disc formats like, CD-ROMs, Audio CD, MP3 Discs, DVD-ROMs, and Video DVDS to lesser-used formats such as PhotoDisc, Enhanced Audio CDs, Video CDs and Video DVDs with DVD-ROM content. As the name would imply, the package allows you to burn your HD video content to discs that can be played on most commercial Blu-ray players. If you have you will need to get the appropriate plugin through an in-app purchase. Gather your materials. While it won’t have all the hidden menus, special features or the other bells and whistles that you could get from something produced by Encore, Toast Titanium can still produce very watchable HD video.
In order to burn your HD movies to Blu-ray, you will need the following:. HD video content from your TiVo, HD video Camera, iMovie, Final Cut, etc.
From iMovie, exporting to a Quicktime movie at “Full Quality” will give you good results. In Final Cut Express, exporting as “Quicktime Movie” will give you similar results. A Toast supported/compatible drive capable of burning Blu-ray discs, such as external solutions or one of the we offer. Toast Titanium Pro 9 or later. Recordable Blu-ray (BD-R) media if you need some, you can find it. A Mac with a G5 or Intel processor running OSX 10.5 or later. Considerable time - The encoding process can take quite a while, depending on your source footage and computer model.
Enough free drive space as the size of the disc you wish to create. (25GB or 50GB for single-layer or dual-layer, respectively) - Since it takes so long to encode, you will likely want to create a disk image and burn copies of that, rather than burn directly. That way, if the burning fails for some unexpected reason (bad media, your cat or kid pulling the power plug out of the drive, etc.) you don’t have to start over from the the beginning.
Let's Get Burning Step 1 - Set Toast up to burn a Blu-ray Video Disc. On the main screen, click the “Video” button in the upper-left portion of the screen, and select “Blu-ray Video” from the menu that appears beneath it. The window should look something like this, though it may vary slightly between Toast versions. Step 2 - Add your movie(s) Take the movie or movies you want to burn and drag them into the right side of the window. If you have more than one movie, you can choose the order in which they play and/or appear by dragging them until they appear how you’d like them.
Step 3 - Adjust disc options. In the lower left portion of the window will be Options menu. If it is not extended already, click on it to reveal the options for the disc. It should look something like the image at right. Click on the “More” button to bring up the full Options window. There are five options under the “Disc” tab.
Disc Name - Gives your disc a unique name, often used for identification purposes. Here, I named it “OWC Videos”. Auto-play disc on insert.
Check this box if you want to start playing the first video on the list immediately, without going to the menu. As I have multiple videos, I left it off, so I can choose which video to watch.
Play all items continuously - Each video will start immediately after the previous one with this checked. If you leave it unchecked, you will return to the menu after each video completes. Add data content - this is for adding DVD-ROM data to the disc.
Under most circumstances, you won’t need it. Add original photos - if you created a photo slideshow, this will store the originals on the disk, as well.
Again, you probably won’t need this for a simple home movie. Under the “Menus” tab, there’s a number of options that affect how the disc menu behaves.
Menu Title - Not surprisingly, this allows you to change the title that shows at the top of the menu. Usually, this will be the title of the disc, as in the above example.
Menu Style - If you want a menu on your disc, you’ll want to select a style from this menu. A basic thumbnail will show to the left. You can get a closer look by clicking on the magnifying glass icon just beneath the thumbnail. Aspect Ratio - If you’re doing HD video, you’ll want to stick to 16 x 9. Leaving it at Automatic will work, too, and is probably the better option.
You can leave the rest of the options in their default settings unless you really feel the need to customize further. You can find detailed information regarding these options in the Toast documentation.
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The “Encoding” tab has two main options, Automatic or Custom. While the “Custom” option offers many levels of tweaking, most of the time, the “Automatic” settings will work just fine.
There are three options for video quality: Good, Better, and Best. Keep in mind that as the video quality increases, so does the encoding time. Good - ideal for simple videos without a lot of movement, a conversation with people sitting in one spot would benefit here. Better - this is for your average video, with some stills and some movement, such as in a school play. Best - this is for videos with a lot of action in them, such as a sports event. As one of my example videos has a lot of action, I chose this option. Once you have made these settings, you can click the “OK” button and return to the main window.
Step 4 - Tweak the clips In this particular example, the videos happen to be named the way I want them to appear in the menu. However, the thumbnails in the video’s menu (as shown by the thumbnails in the list) will simply show blank screens. To adjust either parameter, click on the “Edit” button next to the track you want to edit the information for. In the Text tab, the first line is how the button text appears in the menu. The other lines can usually be left as-is.
In the Video tab, you can select the frame to be used as the button picture by selecting a frame using the playback bar and your left and right arrow keys. In this example, I chose the frame at 00:01.26. Once you have the frame you want selected, click the “Set Button Picture” button.
If you wish to set basic chapter markers, use the “Chapter Markers” menu. Otherwise, just leave it as-is. Click “Done” and repeat the process for any other movies that may be on the disc. Step 5 - Encode. This part is the simplest, but the longest. In the bottom-right corner of the window, you’ll see a big red button.
Immediately to the left of it is an indicator showing what kind of disc you’re burning to and how full it will be when you’re done. Select “BD-R” for the disc type, since we’re burning a Blu-ray movie. While we could burn directly to disc from here, the encoding time for Blu-ray takes quite a while. If you encode and burn directly, anything that happens that could cause a burn to fail (a loose firewire cable, scratched media, etc.) will result in you having to re-encode from the beginning.
Its generally safer to create a disk image and burn from that. To do this, Click the “Save as Disc image” button. You will be prompted to choose a location to save the image. Once you do, the encoding will begin. Again, depending on how long your video is, its complexity, and the speed of your computer, and a number of other factors, encoding can take quite a while.
It is recommended you let the process run by itself and do something else during the encoding process. On a 3.0 GHz, 8-Core Mac Pro, it took 1.5-2.5 times the total length of the video to encode. In this case, an hour’s worth of video, would take between 90 and 150 minutes to encode. Results for your particular machine, however, may vary. Step 6 - Burn Once the disk image is complete, click on the “Copy” icon in the upper left corner - it is the one immediately to the right of the “Video” one. Select “Image File” in the menu that appears on the left.
Drag the disk image you just created into the window on the right. Put a recordable Blu-ray disc into your burner and click the big red button. The burning window will appear. Use the “Recorder” menu to select the burner, if you have more than one - you’ll know you have the correct drive when the status immediately below it says “Blank BD-R.” Click the “Record” button and the burning process will begin. Once the burn is finished, you will have a disc which you can use in your home Blu-ray player. You can close the Toast window; don’t worry about saving changes, as you’ve already burnt the movie to disc.
If you plan on burning multiple copies, you can burn them using that same disk image. Otherwise, you can delete the image and save some space. Congratulations, you have successfully burnt a HD video to a disc that you can watch on your home Blu-ray player!
One of Steve Jobs’s most memorable comments may be the way he referred to Blu-ray as “” back in 2008 during a Q&A with members of the press: “I don’t mean from a consumer point of view—it’s great to watch movies—but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives.” As Macs users well know, things haven’t settled down (at least not from Apple’s perspective). Four and a half years after that comment, OS X still doesn’t support Blu-ray playback, nor has any Mac shipped with a drive capable of even reading or burning data on a Blu-ray disc. And given that few Macs even include optical drives these days, Apple’s never going to bring Blu-ray to the Mac.
(The company can already sell you HD movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, so why would Apple want to embrace Blu-ray?) While Blu-ray was in its early days when Jobs made his “bag of hurt” comment, the format has come a long way, and the Blu-ray disc is holding its own in the marketplace. True, people still buy more DVDs than Blu-ray discs, but. And even though downloading HD movies is easy, there are several reasons to buy Blu-ray discs. The picture quality is better (with higher bit rates and less compression), as is the audio (with several different mixes for multichannel systems).
If you lack a fast Internet connection (or are subject to bandwidth caps from your ISP), it may be quicker and easier to buy a Blu-ray disc than wait to download a file that might top out at 8GB. Also, even with digital extras included with many movies now, you don’t get the full complement of bonus content you do with a disc. Finally, an optical disc is a good, hard-copy backup. Sold on Blu-ray yet? Then it’s time to learn how you can watch and even rip Blu-ray discs on a Mac. The hardware portion of the equation The first step to be able to play Blu-rays on a Mac is to purchase a Blu-ray drive. You can get an external, USB Blu-ray drive for less than $50, though you might want to look around the $80 to $100 range to find a good one.
(The cheaper models are usually from unknown vendors and often get poor reviews from users.) Many of these models are bus-powered, so you don’t need a power supply; just connect them to a Mac that has powered USB ports, and you’re up and running. You won’t need any special drivers to mount the Blu-ray discs, but once they’re mounted, there’s not much you can do with them. MCE Technologies’ $79 USB Super-BluDrive includes Blu-ray playback software for your Mac.
MCE Technologies sells a for $79, which includes software that can play Blu-ray movies (the same program I’m going to look at below, ). OWC also offers both, but you’ll need to bring your own software to the party. Bear in mind that a Blu-ray drive can also play DVDs and CDs. So if you’re planning to get an external drive to connect to a Mac that is devoid of such a device, think about getting one that includes Blu-ray support. Blu-ray playback software At first blush, there are a number of different Blu-ray playback software options for Mac users.
But if you take a closer look, you’ll discover that they are often the same software but with different monikers, sold by companies with different names. I tried two such programs: ($30 for a one-year license or $40 for lifetime usage) and ($60 for a lifetime license, but discounted to $30 until July 1).
Blu Ray Disc Burner For Mac External
These two About boxes look surprisingly similar. That’s not the only way these two programs are alike. In my testing, I found the interfaces to be exactly the same, aside from some different colors.
The Preferences windows are the same; the About boxes are nearly the same, too, with just a slight difference in version numbers. This kind of similarity is common with DVD, Blu-ray, and other types of video-conversion software. For simplicity, I’ll focus on Mac Blu-ray Player.
(Note that Mac Blu-ray Player is due for a 3.0 update soon; I tested version 2.8.) First, you should be aware of a couple of things. Because the software needs to acquire the decryption keys required for playback online, you need an Internet connection for it to work.
Second, registering the software imposes constraints. When I registered Mac Blu-ray Player on my laptop, I couldn’t use it on my desktop Mac. And, when I switched the registration back to my desktop Mac, the software told me I had activated it two out of five times. As the company’s website explains it: There are five times each year for Macgo registration code activation. If registration code activation is outnumbered, it will present a tip “Registration failed. Your registration code activation limit is reached.” Executive Editor Jonathan Seff looked at Mac Blu-Ray Player, and found it quirky and unreliable. Since then, the company has definitely improved the software.
When you insert a Blu-ray disc in a drive and launch the software, it detects the disc and displays a spartan “menu.” Mac Blu-ray Player can’t reproduce the menus on a Blu-ray disc; instead, it presents this limited display. Sometimes, there is no cover art, just a generic Blu-ray logo. In watching half a dozen Blu-ray movies with the software (all recent releases, ranging from Sucker Punch to a just-released disc of Bach’s “St Matthew’s Passion”), I encountered none of those early problems with playback or stability.
Video playback was smooth, with no artifacts, in both a window and in full-screen mode. Audio was similarly fine, although the app crashed once when I turned on subtitles for a movie that wasn’t in English.
I tested the app on both a late 2011 Mac mini (2.7GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM) and an early 2013 MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core i5 with 8GB of RAM), using my 4X Blu-ray drive (discontinued but still available for around $100 online). The software offers the standard play/pause controls, but also lets you skip forward or back in 30-second chunks; change audio track and subtitle synchronization; adjust brightness, saturation, contrast, gamma, and hue; and much more. I found nothing lacking in the software’s functionality.
Ripping Blu-rays In addition to simply playing your Blu-ray movies on your Mac, you may want to copy them to your Mac to watch on your laptop when traveling, or convert to a format you can watch via an Apple TV, for example. Editor’s note: The MPAA and most media companies argue that you can’t legally copy or convert commercial DVDs or Blu-rays for any reason. We (and others) think that, if you own a disc, you should be. Currently, the law isn’t entirely clear one way or the other. So our advice is: If you don’t own it, don’t do it.
If you do own it, think before you rip. There are two methods you can use. The first involves decrypting and copying the entire disc to an.iso disc image. This file will be the same size as the original Blu-ray—about 30GB to 40GB—so you may run into space issues pretty quickly. I used Aurora Software’s free, and this app copied my Blu-ray discs in roughly real time; a 2-hour movie took about two hours to copy. You can then play the copy by mounting the disc image, and using Mac Blu-ray Player. In that app, choose File Open File, or click Open File in the main window, and select the BDMV file in the disc image.
You can also open BDMV files with the free. MakeMKV can rip Blu-ray discs and create MKV files, that you can play back on your Mac. The second method is to make an MKV file (MKV is a file container format that can hold video, audio, picture, and subtitle tracks in a single file). Using GuinpinSoft’s —free while in beta, which it has been for several years (visit to find the current temporary beta key)—you can decrypt a Blu-ray disc and save whatever parts you want (if you don’t need the 7.1-channel audio mix, for example, just uncheck it) into an MKV container.
This takes about half the duration of the movie; when the decryption is finished, you have an MKV file that you can play back with VLC or other software. If you want more manageable file sizes, you’ll need to convert the MKV to a smaller file—in the same format, or in a different format, such as an iTunes-compatible MP4—using a tool such as. Into the blu That’s pretty much all there is to it. You may encounter certain discs that don’t work due to new and varying copy protection, but in general the process is pretty easy if you’re willing to invest a little time and money.