I just bought Adaptec Toast Deluxe 4.1 to burn video-cds from my Mac G4, Final Cut and Media Cleaner. Toast would not accept the Media Cleaner Mpeg-1 file. I contacted Adaptec Support who told me that the only Mpeg-1 that Toast would use was from Astarte M-Pack 1.02 and up. Then they said that Apple has purchased M-Pack and taken it off the market. Does any one know anything about this? Does anyone already have M-Pack 3.5.1 (the latest version)?

-- Tom Shubert (solontv@en.com), October 11, 2000

Answers

It sounds like one of two things.

1) Apple doesn't like anyone using mpeg when they think quicktime should be the only format. (Most people don't relize that dvd's are in an mpeg format!) So they bought it to take it off the market.

2) They bought it, will repackage it and sell it as something new.

I grew up on apples. I work with, UNIX, win 3.1, 95, 98, NT. I had thought an apple was a good computer platform until I was exposed to others. It seems apple advertising makes you feel like kids doing warez use a pc, and if you own an apple you are a yuppy, or some elite. LOL I used to have to pay hundreds of dollars for programs I had to settle for. Very, very limited choices in software for apples. Still to this day only one isle for software at any computer store. Several for other platforms. & not to mention hardware. God, I can bulid anything, add anything, dual pent prosc., hard drives. But when you go to build an apple, you can't. Hell, you can't even take it apart if you wanted to. Special tool to do this, and that. They do it on purpose. I am not going to pay someone to add a damn board, or, ram, or anything to my computer. If you have an apple you have to take it to an authorized dealer for install. Now that's a joke.

I recommend going to pc with NT, or windows. Anyway, my 2 cents.

-- Billy, boy, boy, boy (kilingspam@aol.com), October 12, 2000.

I have M.Pack, but the audio was trash if you played the vcd on a dvd player. I am now using Heuris Power Professional (on my mac), and it works great. It is the same price as M.Pack, and works better, with better control of the encoding. The Heuris stuff will also work from within media cleaner.

p.s. - I think the Astarte products were bought out by Real, not by Apple.

-- Eric (vcd@leuschen.net), October 13, 2000.

A few things. First (sigh) why all the Apple dissin' around here? I've used both Apples and PCs for several years and have found both platforms to excel at certain tasks and fall short at others. Neither one has proved perfect. Many of Apples earlier difficulties (changing RAM, etc.) have been addressed and can be undertaken by any average user nowadays. But enough on this, long and short use what makes you happy (Mac or PC), end of story. The Astarte rumors are true, Apple did indeed buy all of their DVD related products. There's a press release on their site that attests to this. My guess, look for a repackaged product in the future trying to position Apple as a VCD/DVD creation machine. Now for my 2cents, the quality of the encoded streams from Astarte M-Pack never seemed all that good to me. Blockiness and motion jitter seem to plague the encoder (at VCD rates at least). Heuris' MPEG Power Pro does seem to do a better job for the money. All this said, I have found my PC encoders work best at this particular moment in time and do most of my encoding there until I see comparable quality from the Mac solutions.

-- Jim Kosinski (kosinski@ix.netcom.com), October 17, 2000.

M-Pack was garbage in my opinion, and I never, not ONCE, was able to get a VCD with usable audio out of it. Good riddance, I hope Apple buries it someplace where nobody can find it. The whole thing with Toast only accepting files from M-Pack is irritating in the extreme, and makes me want to steer clear of Adeptec and Astarte products altogether. I finally made a working VCD, by using the accursed M-Pack to encode the video, SoundJam MP to encode the layer 2 audio, the demo of Internet DiscWriter to multiplex the files, and B's Recorder Gold (with the English language patch) to burn it to a CD-RW that my DVD player can read. Next time I hope to cut M-Pack and the less than stellar video it produces out of the picture completely.

-- Benson Parrish (benson73@mac-addict.com), November 05, 2000.

I know time has past since you question but upgrade to Toast 5 you can drop quicktime moves on it and it will convert them to MPEG and then Burn you VideoCD. Although one point to note is that it down sizes my video (required for PAL) to 320x240 and note the VCD spec of 352x288 although they play fine on my pioneer 525 DVD player.

-- Steven Whiteley (stevewhiteley@btinternet.com), May 02, 2001.

yu osr

-- mauli (toribiojuarez@prodigy.net.mx), June 26, 2004.

the prob with toast titanium to convert to vcd files... its.. it doesnt save the converted file. So when u wanna burn again, u got to wait for it to convert all over again..

isnt it???

-- ivylock (ivy@thunk.com.sg), December 29, 2004.