Roxio Toast Titanium 8 ® - The Full Review, March 1st, 2007

Roxio Toast Titanium 8 ® - the Full Review
March 1st, 2007 - By Keith Benicek, Editor

The panel’s next favorite feature is Photo Disc, which helps you create cross platform Photo CD Slideshows with built-in viewers for both Mac OS X and Windows. Now this is great for anyone with a Windows PC that you want to send a complete slideshow disk to as Toast 8 embeds an AutoPlay file that launches Microsoft Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

There is one caveat though, do not use separate folders to for different groups of images when you create a Photo Disc. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer does not understand how to deal with subfolders, which essentially it is when you use multiple folders on a CD. Put all the images together in the root of the CD. Roxio should have thought of this ahead of time and warned users in the manual.

Just as with Photo Disc played in a PC, a CD played in a Mac will make use of the Slideshow feature in OS X 10.4.x, including the controls, thumbnails and “Add to iPhoto”. Both approaches are sound, because any upgrade in Windows or OS X viewers, as long as they are the same application family, keeps the created Photo Disc state of the art. There are two downsides though – 1) if Microsoft or Apple ever dramatically changes or eliminated either players, then Photo Disc is useless. 2) If you send a Photo Disc to someone using OS X 10.3.x or below, it is useless to them.

Make picture movies with Toast "Motion Picture HD", everthing is Drag n Drop. Save in QuickTime MOV format

DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders) have become a mainstay in many homes now, they have changed the way people watch television and the term “time-shift” is commonplace when referring to watching your favorite shows. In previous versions of Toast Titanium 6 and 7, you could easily burn EyeTV's MPEG files to video DVDs, but the far more popular TiVo DVR remained out of reach for Mac users.

With Roxio's "TiVo Transfer" utility you can copy movies and TV shows to your Mac from a network-enabled Tivo Series 2 DVR at the limit of your network connect speed (10/100 Ethernet or Wi-Fi rates). Here’s the catch, Roxio's "TiVo Transfer" doesn't decode TiVo's proprietary MPEG to a more standard MPEG format.

You can play it on your Mac with a supplied player, burn it to a DVD with Toast 8 or Toast 8 can convert it to several formats for Sony PSP (best choice), some moble phone or the iPod video (bring your glasses). Toast also burns EyeTV recordings to video DVD. Time-Shifting can now also mean “Location-Shifting” where you watch your TiVo recordings.

Burning TiVo shows to DVD is done simply by Drag-n-Drop in just seconds to program and the actual burning process is only limited by the length of the videos and the speed of your DVD burner.

A couple of footnotes here – make sure that your TiVo is already accessible by your Mac before you install Toast Titanium 8 or you will have to go back through the setup process; and unfortunately except for DVD burning, TiVo limits exported files to 320x240 pixels. Fine for squint and watch iPods, but a bit small for the much larger wide aspect ratio Sony PSP screen.