Toast, Popcorn, MTR

I'm interested in backing up my DVD library and having been reading the dicussions about using MacTheRipper with Toast or Popcorn. Some people seem to be swearing by Toast and others by Popcorn. My question is if all I am interested in is backing up my DVDs does it make sense to spend the extra money for Toast? Are there any differences in picture quality between the two?? I plan on using double layer DVDs if that makes a difference also. Thanks

wwombach said:

I'm interested in backing up my DVD library and having been reading the dicussions about using MacTheRipper with Toast or Popcorn. Some people seem to be swearing by Toast and others by Popcorn. My question is if all I am interested in is backing up my DVDs does it make sense to spend the extra money for Toast? Are there any differences in picture quality between the two?? I plan on using double layer DVDs if that makes a difference also. Thanks

Click to expand...

Have you thought about looking into a free app to rip your dvd's? I use handbrake and it works really well. I have only come across one CD it would not burn.. I have burnt over 50 dvd's with handbrake.

MacTheRipper will take your DVD material to your hard drive. You'll need this as the first step.

Popcorn and Toast compress and write the DVD material to an actual DVD that you can play in your DVD player. This is the second step.

Both Popcorn and Toast are made by Roxio.

All that said, Popcorn is a subset of Toast: if you get Toast, you have the Popcorn functionality. Toast simply gives you more features, Popcorn has fewer features and costs less. There's no difference in the quality of product either software produces.

Hope this helps.

Would suggest you try out Mack the Ripper before you even worry about purchasing burning software. MTR would not touch the first 5 discs
I tried. Oh, it spends the 45 minutes to an hour to rip them, and only after ripping does it tell you there is an error.
Many of the studios are adding a new scheme to their DVD's which causes MTR to give you a bad block error. At this time in OS X, there is no work around. The developer of MTR is working on a version 3.0 which may handle this.

If the disk are copy protected then you will get the error.

I've only run into this problem once. I guess I don't watch a lot of really popular DVDs.

As for ripping time, I've found that MacTheRipper can do a standard 4 GB DVD movie in under 30 minutes on my MacBook.

yeah, i just use handbreak and convert my DVD's to MPEG videos and burn them onto either a CD or a DVD... works great for me, although most dvd players cannot play these type of disks. mine does haha

But DVD players will be able to play Toast or Popcorn burned DVDs??

wwombach said:

But DVD players will be able to play Toast or Popcorn burned DVDs??

Click to expand...

Yes, they will.

Someone might be able to help me out here, i've used DVD Backup and dvd2onex 1.3.1 (i think) for a few years with no probs, but now that i've upgraded my G4 to OSX 10.4.5 so it's inline with my MacBook Pro (OSX 10.4.6) i can't get dvd20nex or DVD Backup to work on either machine, i've now started using Mac the Ripper, which has fixed the first part of the problem, but serial i have for the old version of dvd2onex wont work for the new version i found (dvd2onex2), so can i just use Toast Titanium (7.0) which i already have or do i need Popcorn, which i can't find?

Thanks.

I think this was already said, but Popcorn is just of subset of the Toast program . Toast Titanium has "Popcorn" included essentially. It functions the same way, just has more bells and whistles from the sounds of it.

how do you compress dvd's in Toast 7? In Popcorn it;s easy and doees it for you, but I can't seem to find the compress option in toast - it doesn't seem to be in the menu? also do you burn the dvd as a data disc or dvd-rom?

From what I can see, Toast automatically compresses if it needs to before the burn process.