Mac User can Transfer program, but can't burn DVD

[giabbw]

I recorded The opening ceremonies on my Tivo, as a favor and said I could burn it, but I'm having no luck.

It transfers fine, then I try to save it as a disc image in Toast 8, (which I was told is the best way to deal with files that don't fit on a single DVD). Toast 8 tells me I don't have enough room on the HD, misrepresenting how much I actually have on the HD. Then after that Toast disappears, and is sometimes available after I reboot, and reinstall. Sometimes it takes several attempts to reinstall.

The closest I've gotten to doing this sucessfully, it encoded the file for a full day and then quit at the end.

From what I read on other forums, other people are having similar problems with Toast 9, and popcorn.

Are there any alternatives?

[bedelman]

When you say that Toast is "misrepresenting how much I actually have on the HD" -- could you explain that a bit more? I believe the default working directory for Toast is on your startup drive and not necessarily the drive of where your video file is located. You can change the working directory in the Toast preferences.

If you really are running out of disk space during encoding (which can use a lot of space), you will have issues.

[giabbw]

Bob,

Thanks for replying

I am running of a single drive, so as far as I understand it that shouldn't be an issue. So say the first time I tried to encode this file, I got a message saying something like (figures entirely fictional)

4.5 GB required, 2.9 GB available.

So I dutifully rummage around the drive and clear off some old stuff, and check the finder and find I've got 4.7 GB available. Theorectically we should be good to go, but then toast says

6.6. GB required 4.3 GB available.

Mind you, we are talking about the same file.

Eventually I clear 11 or 12 GB from my disk, without Toast ever acknowledging that I have more that 4 or so GB available.

In the meantime, I've run the maintence scripts from terminal, repaired permisssions and rebooted until the cows come home.

None of which explains the disappearing/reappearing act that Toast continues to pull.

[giabbw]

Okay,

So for some reason entirely unknown to me when I re-tried this this evening, Toast 8 asked for my key (which it didn't do any of the other times I tried to re-install) and didn't give me grief about available disc space.

So now I am back to it taking forever to encode to a disk image. The last time I got this far, after a day or more of encoding time, it failed with an error message.

Frankly I am uncertain that once I have a disk image I will be able to either compress it to fit on one disk to span multiple disks) The original file is 6.7 GB.

My memory is that the one time this worked I saved it as a disk image put the disk image in a TS Folder and used the Fit to disk option to compress it.

Am I even going about this the right way?