Blu-Ray + Mac OS 10.4.11 + Toast = ?

[benjamindbloom]

<p>We just purchased some external blu-ray drives at work to help us archive our photos. We're running Mac Pros with OSX 10.4.11. Toast (8?) to go with the drives. <br>

A coworker was able to get Toast to successfully burn a few Blu-Ray discs, but no one can read them. What's the trick?<br>

I just ran into a press release about SAI's Blu-Ray driver for 10.4 (from June 2007) Do we need to install a driver for OSX to recognize the BluRay discs? Would that enable us to burn & read discs without Toast?<br>

We're looking at 100% data solutions right now, not concerned with burning BluRay video DVDs at the moment. Any advice pointing us in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!</p>

 

[mike_bisom]

<p>Disclaimer: I am not doing Blu-Ray so I can only offer suggestions....</p>

<p>First, you do know you will need a Blu-ray reader drive to read the disks? So I am assuming that you burn your disc with Toast, eject the disc and upon re-insertion it can't be read? That would be strange. The only advice I can say is to go to Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and create a custom size disk image. Copy you files to the disk image and then burn the disk image using Toast. Now what what happens?</p>

[benjamindbloom]

<p>Yup, have external Blu-Ray read/write drives. For the sake of future searches, we're running the LG Super Multi Blue drives (don't have the model number handy) in what looks to be a third party USB external enclosure. The drive system requirements don't mention Mac at all, but it works fine.</p>

<p>Found the solution to our problem. Mac OS X 10.4.11 has no support for Blu-Ray. It doesn't know how to read the format, even though it can recognize the device. Makes sense, the device can function as a CD/DVD burner as well.</p>

<p>Toast 9 is what we used to burn our initial discs. I know that Toast 9 is what people recommended for writing to Blu-Ray discs on 10.4.11. What I didn't know is that Toast 9 comes with, for lack of a better phrase, a Finder plugin that enables 10.4.11 to READ the discs. When I got down to thinking about it, it bothered me that Toast would be able to write & verify, but not provide a way to read the data. Turns out, my colleague hadn't installed this finder plugin when he first configured Toast. When I configured it on my account, it worked flawlessly the first time around.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>Assuming you burned the Blu-Ray disc as a ROM disc, you don't need a special driver to read it. All you need is a Blu-Ray compatible drive. You do need special software to play a Blu-Ray movie. Nero dropped their playback support, probably due to Sony licensing requirements.</p>

<p>I'm not completely comfortable using Blu-Ray discs for general purpose archives. For one, you need a Blu-Ray drive to read them, which are not that common. Secondly, the data is located in a thin, lacquer layer on the front surface. It appears to be scratch-resistant, but there's no possibility you can buff out scratches like in a CD or standard DVD (the data layer is on top or between layers of thick plastic). I use Blu-Ray discs for raw video files (12GB/hour), but little else.</p>

[mike_bisom]

<p>Edward, I read somewhere that Blu-ray was actually developed with archiving data in mind. I think it has a better error correction and recovery already written onto the disc- far better than CDs or DVDs which were never developed as a data archiving solution. In other words, even if the surface or the dye layer of the disc is corrupted, you have a better chance of recovering your media on Blu-ray than CDs or DVDs. That said, I am still a bit nervous using Blu-ray as an archival data source until I am confident they don't change some obscure spec and render my disks useless.</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>Are you getting decent prices for burnable blu-ray discs? I saw a few for sale and the extremely high price per disc put me off even considering them.</p>

[benjamindbloom]

<p>re: reliability & archiving - I haven't done my due dilligence about lifespan estimates & whatnot, but our process is to burn & shelve, so durability is not our first concern. We'd be satisfied if the discs last 20 years, which seems within estimates, based on the brief reading I did on it.</p>

<p>re:prices - the discs are expensive, that's for sure. I don't know what they're paying for media. A quick query to see what it would cost to get Blu-Ray up and running at home showed me $200+ drives and 15 discs for $80. So that's, what, 375 gigs for $80. I can get a 1TB hard drive for $100, so it's a little less than 3x the price of hard drives. It's easier to duplicate & ship a blu-ray disc, though. Not surprisingly, everyone's forecasting prices to drop in 2009 because of new Sony licensing and because of higher volume of adoption.</p>

<p>Still a little pricey for my home use, but it's getting tempting. Mostly, I just want to burn higher amounts of data without spanning so many discs! Burning 25GB or 50GB at a pop sounds great.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p><em>Edward, I read somewhere that Blu-ray was actually developed with archiving data in mind. I think it has a better error correction and recovery already written onto the disc- far better than CDs or DVDs which were never developed as a data archiving solution.</em></p>

<p>The Blu-Ray error correction during writing is outstanding. So far I haven't produced any coasters in over 50 burns. I don't get coasters with DVDs either any more, but they cost $0.35 vs $12.00. They seem to have a scratch-resistant coating, much like plastic eyeglasses. CDs and DVDs show visible scratches if you rub anything across them, even your finger or a lens brush, but not Blu-Ray discs.</p>

<p>In my experience bad DVDs and CDs result from two main causes - a bad burn (software, hardware or buffer underrun) or mechanical damage. The last is by far the most serious since a bad burn is usually detected when you verify the disc (file compare, sometimes with a CRC). Physical damage is something that usually occurs long after the original data is gone.</p>

[susan_jq]

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