Burn Hollywood, burn!

Macs have shipped with the ability to burn CDs and DVDs--via the finder or an iLife application--for a while now. With all that disk-burning going on for free, some people wonder why Roxio continues to produce its Toast application. Despite the Mac’s burning chops, for some, the built-in applications in OS X just don’t cut it. We’re happy to say that Toast 10 Titanium Pro is still the heavyweight burner of choice.

Toast 10’s core functionality is still rock solid. If you need an audio CD burned, Toast is there for you. If you need an ISO 9660 disk burned, Toast has your back. Even DVD-ROMs…yeah, Toast can handle it. With the myriad formats Toast already supports, Roxio has added the AVCHD archive. This new feature gives you the ability to back up your DV tape to disc. And while no Apple computer ships with or will play Blu-ray, Toast 10 will burn disks for your Blu-ray player. Plus, your HD digital video camera doesn’t seem like a waste of pixels when you burn a disc for TV viewing. If you haven’t dropped the moolah on a Blu-ray burner for your Mac, Toast also allows you to burn up to an hour of HD video on a DVD that will play in a standalone Blu-ray deck. It’s not as nice as Blu-ray proper, but it’s serviceable until Blu-ray discs drop in price.

Beyond its core functionality, Roxio has included seven apps that complement Toast and four additional media-centric apps. SoundSoap SE 2 cleans up all those scratchy audio files; it does a good job removing the hum from that podcast you recorded near the air-conditioner. LightZone is like Aperture Lite, with its ability to adjust images. The Spanish-sounding FotoMagico creates HD slide shows for people who just can’t get enough of those Ken Burns documentaries and can’t wait to make their very own. And finally, SmartSound Sonicfire Pro fills the gap left by Apple when it stopped selling the standalone Soundtrack app for creating video soundtracks. These applications are a nice add-on value, but it’s the core applications that make Toast worth its $149.99 price tag, if you have the right equipment.

For TiVo owners, Toast comes with TiVo Transfer and Mac2TiVo. TiVo Transfer allows you to copy your TiVo recordings  to your Mac and automatically convert them for use on a wide range of devices, including iPods, iPhones, Xbox 360s, and PS3s, or you can burn the videos to disc. Mac2TiVo does exactly what the name implies, moving videos easily from your Mac to your TiVo--but we wished Mac2TiVo gave us true video streaming over a network. You can begin watching a video while it’s copying, but even with a gigabit Ethernet connection, our video stopped playing a few times during the hour it was loading.

Toast 10 Titanium Pro does give us what Sling Media promised over a year ago: the ability to stream your own videos over the Internet to your iPhone or iPod touch. Streamer converts video and allows you to set up an account on Roxio’s website to watch your videos. A huge oversight on Roxio’s part is that the media browser found in Toast is nowhere to be seen in the Streamer app, making streaming a bit more tedious than in ought to be. You can batch-convert videos from Toast to Streamer, but it would be helpful if you could automate the conversion process.
 
The Web Video feature in Toast pulls Flash videos from the Internet and gives you the ability to convert them to multiple formats. The app works well with YouTube videos, but has problems with those from other sites.