Burning DVD's--how long?

I recently got Toast 7 Titanium and went to work burning a movie onto a DVD (since I heard that iDVD can't burn anything over 120mins long onto a disc for some weird reason...) Well, it's been close to I believe four hours now since I started the whole encoding/burning process and it's getting close to finishing now. My question is, is it normal for this process to take so long? I could've sworn my friend burned a DVD on his Dell laptop a while back and it took maybe 30mins at the most. Does the encoding process just take that rediculous amount of time?

Oh, I apologize if this is the inappropriate forum, just thought "Other Software" was referring to what I'm talking about...

Thanks for the help guys.

What Mac is this you are doing your burning with Toast on?

Is this movie a Rip from a DVD or a movie of yours? What format is the movie in when you start Toast?

converting from some formats to DVD Video_TS does take a while, but the faster the Mac, the faster it will happen. Ripping from a DVD then burning with toast takes me between 30 min and 45 minutes depending on how much is has to be shrunk to fit the DVD. I use an iMac G5 2.1 Ghz.

Sexy Patrol said:

(since I heard that iDVD can't burn anything over 120mins long onto a disc for some weird reason...)

Click to expand...

A standard single layer DVD will only hold about two hours of video. Where as a dual layer DVD will hold more. You may have to do major compression if you want to get more on a single layer DVD.

I don't know if Toast does a check of media type before the encoding and burn process like iDVD does. So it is possible that Toast will fail in the end.

I tend to encode the movie using ffmpegx and then burning to toast using the methods described here:

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/dvd_sub.html#opening

I can usually squash about 4.4GB of movie onto a single layer disk regardless of length.

Ultimately it depends if you just want a dvd with the movie or if you want menus etc. I always found encoding through toast really slow and haphazard.

If you can rob a bank then get DVD Studio Pro which is just excellent... but costly...

I'm burning with a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz, I want to burn a ~700MB .avi onto a ~4.78GB DVD-R. I don't know if the disc or my drive are single or dual layer.

I think what is taking the time is you have a .AVI and Toast has to convert that to DVD Video_TS first before it burns it. That conversion takes quite a while in Toast at least. On my Mac Mini with a G4 1.25Ghz it takes quite a while for the convrsion but on the iMac G5 2.1 Ghz it's around an hour. Just ripping a DVD on the Imac takes maybe 15 minutes or less sometimes, but converting an AVI to DVD in Toast is not very fast and especially on a G4.