I want to make a DVD with Toast, but my recordings are too long.

A typical single layer DVD can hold about 4.4 GB of information, when formatted to display video.

If your EyeTV recordings are too large, then they won’t fit on a single layer DVD. However, you can use Toast 7 and above(or Toast 6 and Popcorn) to make your video fit.

First of all, make sure you have about 8GB of video, or less. That would be limit of a dual layer DVD.

Creating a Disk Image

Then, start Toast. Add your EyeTV recordings to Toast’s video window. When using Toast you can drag video from your EyeTV Programs window to Toast.

Set the DVD options in Toast as you prefer them. Perhaps you want a DVD menu, or a certain quality. Now is the time to select that. The larger the original data compared to the result, the larger the quality difference will be.

Next, instead of pressing the red button in Toast to burn a DVD, you will go to the File menu, and select Save as Disk Image. That will “burn” your DVD to a file on your hard drive, instead of to a DVD. You’ll need enough space on your hard drive for this image, which will be about the size of the recordings you used to make it.

Opening the Disk Image

When the disk image is completed, then mount (open) it. You will see a VIDEO_TS folder inside. That contains the files necessary to make a video DVD work.

Take the VIDEO_TS folder, and give it to Toast (or Popcorn) for compression. Using Toast, choose the Video section in Toast, and select DVD Video from VIDEO_TS. Then, drag the VIDEO_TS folder from the disk image to Toast.

Now, tell Toast to burn the DVD. Toast will compress the DVD image to a smaller size, so it can fit on a single layer DVD. That process will take some time to complete.

In this way, you can create a DVD image, and then compress it further before your final burn. You can effectively fit twice the video, when compared to the standard process.

If you are a Popcorn user (another Roxio program that specializes in VIDEO_TS compression) then simply treat the VIDEO_TS folder like any other – Popcorn will take care of the rest.

Using Toast 8 and above, the workflow is a bit shorter, and a message box will ask you which media you want to burn, without manually creating a disk image.