Product Reviews

Toast is the king of disc-burning applications on the Mac, catering for a huge number of data, audio and video disc formats. This new version brings it up to date with support for Blu-ray and HD DVD video discs, and plenty of tweaks to the interface and workflow.

At first it looks much like Toast 8 Titanium, but the left-hand pane has abandoned its accordion-like presentation and the jarring animation when switching between categories. These are now presented as buttons at the top of the pane for the different kinds of disc, another for disc and image copying, and media conversion across the top of the pane. It's a welcome retreat from over-styled sensibilities.

The capacity indicator is no longer curled around the record button, instead appearing as a horizontal bar across the bottom of the window. Its prominence and the permanent display of used and remaining disc space is far clearer.

The only bothersome aesthetic that remains is the plump progress window, which would be better scaled to a size akin to iTunes' Mini Player mode. That would sit more comfortably at the desktop's edge.

Some new features are quite subtle, such as the ability to prevent smaller files from being split across multiple discs, so recipients won't need Roxio software to reconstruct them. You're also warned if you haven't changed the default disc name, which helps to make a good impression.

Toast's video conversion features - borrowed from Popcorn - were previously given second-class treatment, previously these were accessed through the export button when building a video disc. They're now listed as the fifth category in the left-hand pane, and benefit from enhancements made in Popcorn 3. Notable are the ability to pause conversion and support for Elgato's Turbo.264 encoder. The issue of surplus black frames in some output, raised in our Popcorn 3 review, was fixed some time ago, so we're happy to see these features updated in Toast as well.

Data could already be burned to Blu-ray discs, and Toast now authors movie discs too. This - and more likely HD DVD support - can be hidden in the preferences if you don't need it, and legacy disc formats such as Video CD are hidden by default. If you're still overwhelmed by the remaining choices,

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tooltips describing each project type will help thanks to their plain language.

Blu-ray burners and media are still pricey, so HD movies can be burned to regular DVDs. A single-layer disc will hold between 20 and 30 minutes of footage. Footage from our AVCHD camera was combined with a photo slideshow, an album from iTunes and an EyeTV recording, all of which played perfectly on a PlayStation 3.

The downside is that although Blu-ray functionality is free for early adopters, it will eventually cost £14.99. We hope this becomes a standard feature as more consumers buy into the Blu-ray format.

There's also support for AVCHD cameras in the media browser, from which you can drag titles directly into your project. Toast has limited editing functionality that's geared to trimming ad breaks. The BD/HD plug-in is a no-brainer for anyone with such a camera as iDVD doesn't yet support Blu-ray.

Video authoring is a mixed bag - the menu editor isn't as comprehensive though, lacking iDVD's lavish themes and the ability to manually place buttons and customise drop zones. Roxio has included several themes in both SD and HD versions, and the menu background can now be a solid colour - ideal for professional showreels.

At users' requests, Roxio has also added a magnifying glass button that enlarges the menu preview, so you can better inspect your choices before burning a disc. It's important when using Blu-ray media as there's no playback software on the Mac, so you'll first see your compiled disc when you play it in a standalone player.

Toast's supporting applications include two new members: Get Backup and Streamer. The former is a front-end for scheduling backups, and can back up to optical media, hard disk, network storage and iDisk too. It's a wonder that Roxio didn't add this sooner.

Streamer is more exciting as it sends movies over the Internet to iPhones, iPods and other Macs and PCs - a feature appearing elsewhere and between devices like the PlayStation 3 and PSP. Drag a movie into Streamer and it uses Toast to convert it. Our network required manual configuration, but Streamer tries to automatically configure a UPnP or NAT-PMP router. Once running, we logged into an account on Roxio's site, which redirected to Streamer's library on our Mac. Video was set to its lowest quality, but our upload speed - a lowly 256kbits/sec - and the Edge network proved a little too slow for comfort. Still, it's a welcome first step in a new direction for Toast.

It's the same versatile application as before, and we're glad to see Toast pushing ahead of the crowd with Blu-ray movie support. We also welcome the newfound prominence given to the conversion features, though the deal is less enticing if you already own Popcorn 3 or don't have an AVCHD camera, in which case Toast 8 may still prove sufficient.