You need Mac software to get the most out of your DVD recorder. As you can see from Figure 1, those Mac folks look different again: This time, it's Toast 6 Titanium, from Roxio, the king of recording programs on the Macintosh.
Figure 1: No butter, no jelly - just Toast.
In addition to the standard formats - audio, data, mixed-mode, Video CD, and CD Extra - Toast 6 can produce a couple of nifty extras:
- Hybrid discs: These strange beasts can be read under both Windows and Macintosh operating systems - they're often used for cross-platform applications that have both a Mac and Windows version. Games are often shipped on hybrid discs for the same reason.
- Super Video CD: Also called SVCDs for short, Super Video CDs can store digital video files just like standard Video CDs. As the name suggests, however, Super Video CDs provide significantly better video quality (at the expense of disc space, so SVCDs typically hold only about 45 minutes of video). Standard Video CDs can usually store up to 60 minutes of digital video.
- MP3 music discs: These discs store music files in MP3 format.
- DVDs: Toast can burn both DVD data and DVD-Video discs on supported drives.
If you're burning discs for older Mac operating systems, you can use the Mac standard format. However, if your disc is used on a newer machine running Mac OS 9.0 or later, you should use the enhanced Mac OS Extended mode.
As any Mac technotype can tell you, the Mac operating system can mount a disk image as a virtual drive on your desktop. Toast can both create and mount these images for you, so you can store multiple images on a single CD or DVD and use them rather than hunt for a physical disc. Also nice is the Compare feature in Toast, where you can compare two folders or files and view the differences - usually one folder or file on your hard drive and another on a CD or DVD disc.
