Creating a Hybrid CD-ROM with Toast 7
Posted on December 19, 2005 in Inspiration
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
Tested Platforms: PC
- Windows XP SP2 + service updates to 12/19/2005, AutoRun Enabled … OK!
- Windows XP SP2 + service updates to 12/19/2005, AutoRun Disabled (and broken) on my notebook. Only Projector file visible, clickable. Acceptable.
- Windows 2000 Advanced Server + service updates to /12/1/2005, AutoRun Enabled. Icon didn’t show, replaced with generic icon. label didn’t show. Presentation launched automatically. Double-clicking CD drive launched presentation as it should.
- need to set up some virtual machines for Win98, ME, 2000 testing
Tested Platforms: Macintosh
- PowerBook 12″ MacOS 10.4.3 … OK!
- iBook 300MHz (bondi blue) running MacOS 9.2 … No autoopen or fanciness of course. Flash Player doesn’t even run on it anyway.
59 Comments
Dave, you rule!! This is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
Thanks very much for this, it was a big help. Right on.
For anybody using Toast 6 Titanium (OS X 10.4.4), you may have better luck if you read all of the above, but select the Mac disc before adding the PC files. I also have some other notes that might help someone. This was for a Director project.
* don’t forget to flatten .movs if you have them (Lillipot works well and is free)
* make disk image using Disk Utility – absolutely do NOT use Toast
* make sure cross platform disc and application icons are in order
* copy all Mac files to the image, none of the PC only files
* fix window size, layout, icons
* set AutoOpen
* Toast 6: select hybrid disk, select Mac disk image
* add PC files to the ISO side – add single files first, create any folders from Toast
* add all the shared files from disk image – don’t drag the folder, drag files into the Toast folder (you don’t get all the Mac hidden files this way)
* hide the PC files you want to hide (double clicking opens the dialog)
* Very important last step: leave the Mac image mounted, and right before you click record in Toast, hide the Mac files you want to hide. If you get errors in Toast when you click record, it’s probably because you hid the shared files before Toast had a chance to see them.
* burn disc
HI
Thanks for all of this (very useful).
Just 1 question :
– would it be possible to add a background image for the PC side (maybe I missed something ?) ?
Best (from Paris-France)
Hi Davacorp!
That’s a good question. It’s possible on the Mac because Mac OS X has it built in. Windows XP does have “folder backgrounds”, but I’ve never seen this used on a CD-ROM. I have all the fancy stuff turned off, though.
So my answer is “no, I don’t think so”, but I haven’t looked at this more closely
Dave,
Nope, we don’t know each other but I luckily managed to stumble upon this post of your while in crunch time at work where a client asked for an idiot proof disc for mac/pc to play some webads.
And thank god I found this post or I would’ve been pretty lost with dated tutorials on Roxio’s site.
Anyhow, I ran into one problem, after making the “_data” folder invisible using devtools through terminal and trying to burn the disc. It would tell me everytime that the files in the data folder couldn’t be found for burning and that they’d be skipped. On testing this dsic I found that it played perfectly fine on a osx box but when put into a winbox it wouldn’t be able to pull assets from the “_data” folder.
My work around was to just put the files out of view on the mac side when the window opens to its default view… I see that its the last thing you are suppose to do is hide the files but even so, it being the last thing I do, right after I hide and hit record it tells me stuff is missing.
10.4.4
Toast 7.0.2
nermind…
wops head
got it to work after reading Brads post!
a thousand thanks to you all!
o )
Hi erg8t! I wonder if this was a recent change in Toast, or in OS X. It might have been that for my WinBox side of things, I didn’t actually source the files from a hidden data folder, but used a visible one and then hid it using the controls inside of toast. So I may have had two separate data folders instead of one shared one. I’ll have to go back and see what I did. Thanks for sharing the experience you had…good to know.
Wow! This was one terrific site. You have no idea how much this has helped me with my current project. I am creating a cross platform filemaker runtime database for a music library. Everything stated here has worked flawlessly..well at least on the Mac side! I do have a problem with the runtime crashing on Windows however. I’m wondering if this has to do with the drag and dropping of the shared mp3 folder into toast. The folder contains subfolders of categories, then the mp3’s. The database freezes upon the search result page that populates with the list of mp3’s, then the application crashes. What kind of problems have occurred with drag dropping folders into toast? If anyone has any idea whether this could be causing the problem, please let me know!! You guys have been extremely helpful!!
Thanks so much!
Dave
Really excellent article and spot on. I actually already knew most of the above as its what I do, but was dreading having to explain it to my client. Luckily you did all the hard work! I think Roxio should work this up (with screen shots) and publish it on their site.
Keep up the good work.
Hi Laura! Not sure what’s causing your runtime crashing. If you burn a regular CD-ROM (not hybrid), does it work? It could be that the application isn’t designed to work with hidden files, or it’s some kind of filenaming conflict. Could be anything, really! Try just making a regular PC CD-ROM and see if that works first.
Matt: Glad you found it useful! I certainly didn’t want to explain it to MYSELF again in the future :-)
Hey! Surprised (but not really) to find myself here. I needed to create a Custom Hybrid CD and was running into all kinds of problems, googled “autorun custom hybrid” and who should show up on top of the list but you!?!
Very informative as always, thank you very much!
One additional tip: You can use the “bless” command from the terminal to make the CD auto open in Mac OS X. For example, if your CD name is “InqScribe”, the command looks like this:
sudo bless -folder /Volumes/InqScribe/ -openfolder /Volumes/InqScribe/Hey Ben! Thanks for the bless command use…that’s something I didn’t know! Woot!
Ben’s writeup on the process has some important additional notes. Thanks for putting them out there, dude!
Hi,
I got some problems making my files invisible. When i try to do it in the Terminal, like written in this article my files don’t get invisible. I tried to mount the diskImage with the diskutility but this didn’t help. Then i tried to download a programme to hide the files this works but when I want to open my flash projector file now it can’t find the files that are hidden. What can i do??
I hope someone has a solution for this…
I have a bootable CD-rom which works fine. BUT
It only boots from the CD-R burner and not from my DVD player drive.
My DVD Drive does not even recognize that this disk is loaded.
The real problem is that I can not view any of the files on the CD. Even in safe mode or from DOS.
DOS tells me their are 0 files on the disk.
How is this possible ?
I am guessing it is some sort of copy protection.
I want to know how this was done, so I can do it to other programs I write and burn.
Any Ideas how I can view & copy these CD files ?
I have Win XP and ME. Attrib, Dir and xcopy are of no help.
Please reply
MRGCAV@hotmail.com
If you’re trying to break the copy protection on a CD, I can’t help you.
If you’ve created a CD that only works on your CD-R burner and not your DVD drive, try (1) changing the media/kind of CD-blank your using and (2) burn at a slower speed. In the old days, we had to burn CDs at 1X speed to create masters for duplication; this doesn’t seem to be a requirement anymore, but since DVD drives are sometimes finicky about burned media I would give those two things a try.
Possible to use .VolumeIcon.icns custom on it? Usually you can see the file in roxio to rename, since you can’t outside of it. But since we’re adding volumes, there is no chance to rename the file?
Jared: No idea…I would imagine this is possible, since I think I’ve seen mac CDs with custom volume icons, but I could be imagining this…
Dear David…….
i really appreciate your sugession about how to make a CD Autorun for both PC & OSX…..
But my problem is the data which i am using on Cd its more than 400mb…..
and i can not make two platform…..for both pc and mac…..can not store in the same disc…..
i have over 150swf…..which i would like to have a Autorun for both mac and pc…..
is there any other easyer way which u could recomend….any other software…..
i sincerely appreciate your help…..
Tony
Hi Tony,
You want to look at making a hybrid CD with a SHARED files segment. So long as you have enough room for the PC-specific projector (which usually is pretty small I’d think), you should be able to make a hybrid cd that has both a PC side and a Mac side, and uses the SAME set of SWF files, so you don’t have to add them twice.
The instructions above sort of allude to this in TOAST PREP, PART I, step 2.
Hi everybody.
I have created a PDF with several attachments (movs, jpg’s, etc), therefore, I created a Catalog to get an index of all this files. I am using Roxio Toast Titanium to create a Custom Hybrid CD (ISO for PC) and a Mac Volume.
According to Roxio the way to create a Hybrid disc, is to add the folder using SELECT ISO (for PC), and for MAC it says you have to create a Temporary partition and then copy the items to burn, but by doing that you break the path of the catalog!
When I insert the Cd on a PC it works fine, but when inserted on a Mac, it says it cannot open “picture.png” or the movs.
Does anybody how to create a hybrid CD with both a MAC and PC volume with out breaking the index of my catalog?
Thanks!
alexgab@gmail.com
MacOx 10.3.9
Acrobat 7.0 professional
Roxio 6 titanium
Alex: What do you mean by “Catalog”? Is this a feature of a program you are using?
You probably have to author the catalog such that it refers to the correct directory path on both the Mac and PC side of things. I would look at where the files are ending up on the Mac side, and then make sure your catalog paths match. If they don’t, reorganize it so they do.
Hi, Dave.
By “Catalog” I mean a feature in Adobe Acrobat to create an index so the PDF knows where to locate pictures/movs to display. It creates a directory path. When adding my complet Project folder with button ISO PC in Roxio, I add my whole folder without moving it anywhere, so the directory paths remains.
But when I intend to create the Mac version, I need to create a temporary partition, via Roxio or Disk Utility, then Drag the folder to that image, and I think at that point the directory path is broken. Perhaps that’s why my project runs well on Pc but broken in Mac, don’t you think?
Hey Dave:
This is an extremely useful tutorial. You can’t imagine the number of CD’s I had to throw out before I found this.
Everything worked great, however, the pc files that I specified to be hidden still show up on the pc. They look dimmed or “shaded” but they are still visible. Any reason for this. I tested on Windows 2000 and XP and got the same result.
Scott: You probably have “Show Hidden Files” turned on in your Explorer Folder Options. Designers and programmers often have this turned on (along with “show file extensions”) because we need to see DLLs and other hidden information. Most users don’t have it turned on though.
Came across this clear explanation on AutoRun via Matt Ellis’ site. Noted for future reference.
hi there. totally fantastic tutorial. cant bleeve I found it.
got a question, maybe someone knows – I would ideally like my hybrid CD to also play in a CD player (of course, separate 16bit 44.1 wavs/aifs).
the rest of the CD is for a presentation CDrom made in flash.
I used to be able to do this with the old toast – create a hybrid data and audio CD. can I do this now? ie, a hybrid Audio&mac&PC Cdrom !
I cant find the info anywhere…
thanks all
Thank you so much for this helpful information! I was incredibly worried about cross-platform ‘bootability’ for my client’s flash project – you have saved the day! Now all I have to work out is how to compile a universal version of the mac projector (which runs ever so slow on my new Macbook, but 150% faster on my 800mhz iBook!)
Quick question. Can you use dvd’s as the media for this project?
Leon – DVD will autorun on a PC (but I’m not sure whether you can create hybrid ones).
Another question – does Toast truncate file names? While my project runs great on a PC, flash on a Mac only loads 80% of the external swfs. When I looked these swfs closer, I noticed they were long file names (32+characters). Any ideas anyone?
John: Apparently the Mac side of the Hybrid CD is HFS, which has a 32-character filename limit. It’s a long-standing Mac limitation going back years, even though modern Macs running OS X can have more characters now (at least on the hard drives)
Thanks for the great tutorial. I had been using another toolset to build hybrids, but that stopped working recently. I came across your article here and I like it, it is much better than my old method.
However, I do have one problem. Have you tried this with OS X 10.4.7? Once I updated to 10.4.7 I was no longer able to mount the CDs I built. Are you able to?
Thanks!
Paul
Paul: I haven’t build a hybrid CD for some time, so I haven’t tried it with the latest OS X update. Sometimes I did find that mounting the CDs would be finicky if I had been opening/closing virtual disk images of them, and a reboot would clear that up.
Thanks a bunch for this info. Got the hybrid disc burnt in no time (though this is also covered in the Toast help just FYI). If you want to place a custom icon on the CD there is a real easy way to do it.
Follow the directions for setting up a temporary disc partition through Toast. You should see a CDR/W icon for this temp disc partition.
Create the .icns file using a program such as IconBuilder. Command-Click on your custom icon and “get info”. In the top left corner there is a little icon. Select this (it highlights in blue) then click “Edit”->“Copy”. Go to the temp disc partition and Command-Click on it and “Get Info”. Select the little icon in the top corner then click “Edit”->“Paste”. If you did everything right it should now have your custom icon. Then go back to Toast and burn, and you’re good to go.
I just burnt about 10 coasters trying to get this to work with the “.VolumeIcon.icns” trick which doesnt work for some reason. Hope this helps.
Hi Dave: Great resource. I had great luck “hiding” my mac side files/folders with an application called “XRay.”
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12103
Thanks for the terrific tutorial!
Another way to make file invisible… Open Terminial and enter “mv ” drag the image from the volume to the terminal window..now drag it over again and use the left keyboard arrow to move back to the start of the image name and add a fullstop (.) Hit Enter for the file to be made invisible. (Make sure you selected the file to be the background image before doing this!)
Thanks a lot David for this great tutorial. And many thanks to Brad as well for his useful additional info. I guess I would never have been able to get my portfolio CD neatly done without your help.
I’m a graphic designer, I have set my interactive portfolio in PDF format, and was willing to go the extra mile to have custom icons, custom window background, and autorun for the CD version of it.
I’m not at all into technical stuff, and your tutorial took me through the Mac part painlessly. Even if it doesn’t autolaunch the PDF, I’m happy with the neat window that pops on the screen as soon as the CD mounts.
I’m working on a Powerbook G4, and don’t have access to a Windows platform. So, to get the ISO side of the hybrid CD done, I had to find solutions.
First to type the autorun.inf file. I used for that matter BBedit Lite 6.1, it’s a piece of freeware, and it did the job pretty well. Just make sure if you use this text editor to set the saving preferences to DOS/Windows.
To hide my files, I used XRay 1.1 (already mentioned by Afletch) and I guess there isn’t anything more simple and convenient around. It’s working both ways, invisible/visible. You can get a free trial version, a license costs ten bucks, a deal hard to beat!
Now, to get my PDF to autostart on a Windows platform, I thought there should be ways to write an .inf command that would start Reader from the user’s HD. I assume that nowadays, everybody has a copy of this program at hand. But I didn’t really find useful information on the net.
I was really about to give up, when I tried out of desperation the simplest thing I had found on this site:
http://www.phdcc.com/shellrun/autorun.htm
and it did the trick! I couldn’t just believe it when I saw my portfolio welcome page pop up on the laptop screen after a few seconds!
Here’s the content of my .inf file:
[autorun]
shellexecute=myfile.pdf
icon=myicon.ico
I just feel like stupid to have spent like 3 days to get there!!!
Thanks again, and I hope this will help beginners as I am.
Hello again from Paris!
I’m wondering if some souls are still hanging around this blog once in a while? Anybody out there?
Here’s the deal:
After being successful with my portfolio autostart hybrid CD, I decided to push a little farther and added sound to some pages and buttons. The only problem now, when the CD starts automatically on a Windows station, it’s still opening to my portfolio welcome page, but a window pops up asking if it is OK to play the media content. Is there a way to avoid this window popping and get the sound right away? Is it a matter of sound files format (I embedded mp3 in my PDF), a matter of Acrobat preferences settings or whatever else? Any suggestions are more than welcome. Many thanks.
It sounds like a windows browser security thing, which is controlled by the browser and not by your authored media. For a portfolio CD, you can’t assume that your viewers will set any preferences, so you are probably out of luck there. I would just dump the sound…if your portfolio is visual, having some music play as you view a static page is just a kind of distraction. Personally, unless the music is synchronized to the presentation or an animation, I am not that impressed by it. Some viewers will like the idea though…you might reauthor your page to include a Flash MP3 player in a hidden frame, and have the PDF loaded into another frame (all in HTML). You’ll need to workaround the activeX plugin “click to play flash content” issue for IE.
Thanks Dave, I’ll give it a shot.
Actually, there is no sound behind my portfolio images, just chimes when running the mouse over thumbnails, and a smooth jazz type tune launching when the “Thank you for visiting” page, the last one, launches. So it’s not really disturbing the presentation. But you’re right, I can also live with a no sound version if I have to…
Thanks for being so fast answering, I wasn’t sure you would be around this section that is almost a year old…
Just a note: AutoRun 1.0 is nowhere to be found, nibFiles.com no longer exists and VerionTracker download link leads to cancelled .Mac account.
Are there alternatives for this software?
Adam: I found an alternative command, but haven’t personally tried it yet (this is all one line typed into Terminal):
sudo bless -folder “/Volumes/DiskName/” -openfolder “/Volumes/DiskName/”Where DiskName is the name of the Mac disk image that you’re planning to burn, already mounted.
Alternatively, there is a program DropDMG ($20) apparently will let you set the Auto Open properties. I haven’t tried this program either.
Anyway, you can try these alternatives to AutoOpen and see if they work for you.
I wonder if anyone can help: I can’t seem to get my projector (on the mac side) or .exe (pc side) to launch a pdf from a hybrid cd – I’m only using get url, it works fine on my machine but once i create a cd it just can’t find the pdf’s. I’ve tried messing around with fscommand folders but it doesn’t make any difference… anyone have any ideas on what i’m doing wrong?
thank you for all the great information that i wasn’t able to find by googling around the internet!
i’ve found that i don’t really need to make a cross-platform auto-run cd-rom, since os x apparently has a problem with this, as well as the possibility of security issues.
what i want to do, is simply make a custom icon for the cd-rom that when clicked, opens a window with a custom icon that when double-clicked opens a java album in a web browser (http://jalbum.net). these java albums are very nice, and would take a lot of time to workup via a director project, or a dvd project with clickable buttons and folders (maybe not these days).
i think i can easily make the custom icons. i recall opening various installers over the past years that included large pictures made up of a lot of smaller icons…the installer with custom icon was off to the side. is anyone familiar with a mac application that would create these large images made of small icons? having the name of what these things are actually called would be handy, i guess.
thanks for any help, and thank you for all the previous information!
Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows how to create hybrid data dvds with autorun, as well as the usual VIDEO_TS folder for dvd players? Seems logically possible?
GREAT! I needed this for a project and didn’t have a clue where to start. Followed your instructions to the letter and it was done in one shot. Thank you very much for sharing this.
It should be noted that this process WONT WORK for a disc over 2GB. That is the limit on HFS discs. So an interactive DVD-Rom cant be created this way.
Hi
This is an extremely useful tutorial. You can’t imagine the number of CD’s I had to throw out before I found this.
Thanks
Hi !
Great great great tutorial ! Thousand thanks for that !
Great tutorial!
And I do want to mention that the “sudo bless” method of making the disk auto-open is working great.
I am still going to go through your process, which seems pretty bulletproof, but I can’t help but wonder why the normal ‘hybrid’ preset doesn’t work straight out of toast 8. The interface provides the means to add icons, labels, autorun, make files invisible, etc.
Except when I try this it behaves correctly for mac, but doesn’t make the files I marked invisible go away on windows. If that part worked then you would do everything you listed out right in the toast interface in a matter of seconds.
Or am I missing something?
Ben: It’s been such a long time since I’ve had to actually make a hybrid CD-ROM since I wrote this article, and these instructions are for Toast 7. I haven’t used Toast 8, so I can’t speak to its features. I believe that is what you are missing.
Thanks for the reply, Dave. I actually spoke too soon… In a n00bish move, I forgot that I had visible files turned on. D’oh.
The CD works great – and all features outlined in your article were taken care of directly in Toast 8’s interface under the normal hybrid CD option (not custom). I just wanted to post that here because it seems that all roads lead to this article when searching for hybrid cd authoring. (Toast’s site is useless)
Cheers!
As a follow up to Ben’s comment, this also works more or less out of the box in Toast 9. Briefly:
1. Created disk image with ALL (Mac+PC) files.
2. Made Mac layout all pretty and used setfile to hide any files user doesn’t need to see (including ALL PC files).
3. Drug mounted volume into Toast (after creating new Mac+PC project), used the check boxes to set which files are visible to Macs, PCs or both, un-hid the PC executable.
4. Burn.
Glad to have found this page again (like a long lost friend). Found it a couple of years ago, when it helped with a client’s project, but I stupidly forgot to bookmark it. Cue a frantic Google with different keywords to rediscover it. Got it again, and bookmarked it. It all works brilliantly. The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the set up of the Mac window that opens when you insert the disc. For some reason, even if I hide the toolbars and set up the window as I want it to reappear before closing it, it never quite keeps all the properties of the original window (a scrollbar will reappear, or the background image won’t quite fit the new window size). Apart from that – all good.
ah – ok – got it (re above problem)
If anyone else was suffering from the same issue as my post above, sudo bless the disk image/folder BEFORE arranging the window, background pic, files and part of screen you want it to appear. Then close the finder window, unmount the volume and then try mounting it again.
This worked for me.
http://www.nibfile.com/site/products.php
Auto open is still alive
I seem to be either too tired or too stupid to get this right. It all seems pretty logical, but the mac image won’t be read by toast, therefore crucial files are missing. Started anew with the normal MAC&PC option, I hope this will bring some decent results. But even though things didn’t work out 100% for me, this is one of the most comprehensible tuts I’ve found on the subject. I’ll finally buy a PC for testing and try this again….
YOU ARE THE MAN!!!! thanks a lot from italy. you saved me a bunch of time.