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Toast now keeps track of which files you’ve stored on which burned discs using the accompanying DiscCatalogMaker RE application, so you can locate content more easily once you’ve offloaded it and put the disc away. Toast installs a small Mac OS X- and Windows-compatible application called Roxio Restore alongside the archived data, so when you want to recover files you’ve backed up to CD or DVD, you don’t need Toast to make it happen-you just need the disc itself. As before, you can span data across more than one CD or DVD. Toast 8 Titanium works better as a file archival and backup system in this new version, too. But as I write this, Apple hasn’t yet built in support for Blu-ray drives, which means you must install software on your Mac to get a Blu-ray drive to work. Each 5.25-inch dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 50GB of data, compared to 4.7GB of data on a single-layer DVD-R disc. It would be handy if there were a way to automate this entire workflow.īlu-ray, Sony’s high-definition optical disc format, is gaining traction as a consumer product, but it’s also appearing as a computer storage format, and it’s not hard to understand why. For example, once my TiVo content is on my hard drive, I still need to tell Toast to rip the video to a format that my PSP understands. TiVoToGo doesn’t completely automate the process of converting video, though. But Toast 8 Titanium is still the best Mac application out there for exporting video to a wide range of different formats. Though I could massage it a bit using Toast’s extensive options, I still had a hard time getting results that satisfied me.
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Handbrake -images were often darker and less distinct.
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I found the quality of video converted and exported by Toast 8 Titanium to be lower than I could achieve on my own with applications like Unfortunately, the actual quality and speed of video output still leaves something to be desired. You can wake up in the morning and find last night’s episode of Lost or Heroes already on your hard drive and ready to rip to disc-or convert for your iPod or PSP. Setting up Auto Transfer helps automate the process of bringing content over to your Mac. Setting up the TiVo Transfer application is a lead-pipe cinch: you enter your TiVo DVR’s Media Access Key, and the application displays the TiVo’s contents.
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