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)

Geeky notes in progress to myself on a CD-ROM project: how to create a CD that will work on the Mac and on the PC, using Roxio Toast 7 and a small flotilla of support utilities. This is the first time I’ve done this in—geez—12 years, so I had to research the current process.

I don’t want to have to look this up again, so I’m writing it down. VERY GEEKY. You’ve been warned.

These notes are still a little rough, but should get you in the ballpark of what you need to do

Make sure you read the comments at the end too; there are some helpful notes that other users have added (especially regarding the tricky hiding of files).

Update for Toast 8: I’m told by a reader that the newer version of Toast, version 8, actually implements a lot of these features more intuitively now. I have not personally confirmed this though.

Authoring Options

The project: A Flash Projector that loads SWF movies from a subdirectory named _data. The projector needs to automatically run on the PC, and open a folder on the Mac with the projector readily clickable. Also, want to make it very obvious what to click on by hiding files that are not user-friendly.

I last used Toast in 1993 to make hybrid CD-ROMs. These are CD-ROMs that have both the nice Mac icons and PC files. The Mac doesn’t see the PC files, and the PC doesn’t see the Mac files. If there are shared files (for example, giant video files), they can be made visible to both Mac and PC sides.

MacImage is a PC solution that does the job, but doesn’t allow you to create a nice Macintosh partition with custom backgrounds. Looks like a good solution for sharing data with basic functionality, but it won’t create a CD that holds up to the expectations of discerning Macintosh users.
Adaptec Toast 7 Titanium ($99, Macintosh) still has a custom hybrid mode that allows you to create decent hybrid CDs. And a lot of other “home” oriented uses like “backing up your DVDs” and other such nonsense. Despite that, I bought it after MacImage didn’t end up doing what I needed. It seems to work, though the UI dialogs are a little buggy. This used to be very solid German software when it was just from Astarte. What happened?

Hardware / Software Kit

Here’s what I ended up using…

Powerbook 12″ with a Matshita CD-RW CW-8122 combo DVD/CDRW drive.
Mac OS X 10.4.3
Roxio Toast 7 Titanium (version 7.01)
~~AutoOpen 1.0 from Nibfiles.com~~ No longer available!
Apple Disk Utility 10.5.3 (198.5)
XCode developer kit utility SetFile to set invisibility bit
Photoshop w/ IconBuilder XP from iconfactory.com (Windows Version) to create .ico file
Text Editor on PC to create autorun.inf file
Blank CD-RW disk for testing (didn’t want to waste lots of CD blanks)

Prepping the PC Side

When someone inserts the CD into a Windows PC, it should automatically run a file (assuming AutoRun is enabled and functioning). This is accomplished with the AUTORUN.INF file. It must be prepared on the PC side, because PC-ANSI line endings must be used otherwise AUTORUN will fail. In other words, don’t use the Mac to create the following file, and don’t edit it on the Mac either. Here’s my AUTORUN.INF file:

[autorun]
label=E3Expo Prospectus
icon=_dataE3Video.ico
open=E3ExpoProspectus.EXE

Notes:

label is the name of the CD as it will appear in My Computer. This is different from the CD-ROM Volume Name. It may contain spaces and be over 16 characters (unlike the CD-ROM Volume Name). This may be a feature only available on Windows XP.
icon is the pathname to an icon to use for the CD-ROM, as it appears in My Computer. Here it’s pointing to a directory called _data. The E3Video.ico file contains Icon resources created with an Icon Editor. In my case, the program I used was The IconFactory’s IconBuilder XP.
open is the program to run. The pathname may not have any spaces in it. You can also select an icon to show, if it’s embedded in the EXE, if you’re not using the icon entry by appending a comma followed by a number. To do this you would have to build the icon into the EXE resource, which requires other development tools on the PC to do.

You’ll note that there’s three files listed: The _data folder, the AUTORUN.INF file, and the projector itself E3ExpoProspectus.EXE. The average person may not know which file to click on to run it, should AutoRun fail to work on their computer. Fortunately, we can hide all the files except for the projector using the Toast 7 ISO Layout Tools.

Prepping the Mac Side, Part I

We’re going to make a separate disk image to contain all our files for the Mac side. This will allow us to set it up just right:

We’ll have a cool Custom Background Picture for the Folder!
There will just be ONE icon, the movie projector, to click on!
The Folder with the projector will automatically open when the CD is inserted.

Launch Disk Utility (it’s in your Applications/Utilities folder). Create a new disk image that’s big enough to hold all the files you want. I made a 40MB disk image, with R/W access, and named it as I want my CD to be named when it’s inserted. Save the disk image (it has a .dmg suffix) somewhere. Use Disk Utilty to mount the disk image. An icon will appear on your desk representing the new disk image. This is a virtual hard drive. Cool! For the sake of example, the Disk Image shall be named E3Expo Prospectus.
Copy all your Mac files, including files you plan to SHARE on the PC side, into the new disk image. Arrange them how you want. Warning. In my limited experience, deleting and re-adding files seems to mess up some file references after I burn (background images not showing up, for example). It might be something else, but thought I’d mention it. Renaming files is OK, though.
To apply the background folder image, go to the Finder’s View menu and choose Show View Options. Click This Window Only at the top, then choose Picture at the bottom. Navigate to an image that’s on the new disk image you created. If it’s not there, move it there. For my example, the background file (I’m using a PNG file) needs to be on the volume named E3Expo Prospectus, because that’s going to be converted into my CD of the same name.
Adjust the size of the window to match the background, and position icons artistically. If there are files you’re planning on hiding later, just stuff them somewhere away from where the pretty layout is happening. You may want to use the Finder to hide the toolbar (the selector on the left of the window) and change to icon view. Both these options are in the Finder’s View menu.
Close your folder window and open it again. This will save the layout.

We’re eventually going to hide all the files we don’t want users to see, but before we do that we have to set up Toast 7 to access files shared between the Mac and PC side. That’s because Toast can’t see hidden files, so to add them to the PC side they need to be left visible. For reference, here’s the files in the _data folder, to be shared between both the Mac and PC sides of the disk, as it appears in my mounted disk image on the Mac:

/Volumes/E3Expo Prospectus/
    _data/
        folderbg.png
        video.swf
        loop.swf
        E3Video.ico
    E3Expo Prospectus

The only file I want showing is E3Expo Prospectus, the application(not the volume name). So, I plan to hide the _data folder. Since I also need to share this folder on the PC, I need to wait until after I’ve added it to the ISO builder in Toast. Make sense? No? Well, just take my word for it.

Toast Prep, Part I — Build PC ISO Side of Disk

The Custom Hybrid mode is available when you show legacy formats and settings in Toast 7’s preferences. While you’re there, also check Show hidden files in content areas.

Make a new CD and choose Custom Hybrid as the type. You’ll see that you can choose a Mac and an ISO part of the CD. We’re going to set up the ISO side first. This is what the PC sees.
Click on the Select ISO button and you’ll see a Layout box. Add all your PC files here. For SHARED files, add them from the Mac disk image you’ve been working on. Toast will figure out that these are shared files and will do its magic behind the scenes. Note that there is some kind of bug with adding folders…if you add a folder first, the listing gets messed up. So add a regular file first, then the folder.
Name the CD to something other than “My Disc” It must be less than 16 characters to conform to Windows standards (“Joliet”). Note that the label entry in the autorun.inf file will be displayed in place of the actual CD Volume name on newer computers; older computers will see the old name.
After you’re done adding everything, we can hide the files. Select the Icon (not the name) and type COMMAND-I (Info). You can then check the hidden option. Alternatively you can double-click the Icon to get this dialog. It doesn’t seem to be documented. You can even hide the AUTORUN.INF file and AutoRun will still work, at least in my limited testing.
I left the Layout and Settings dialogs alone. The Defaults seem to work fine.

Prepping the Mac Side, Part II

Now that we’ve added our shared _data folder to the ISO side, we can go ahead and hide the files we don’t want to be seen by the Mac user.

You need to make sure you have XCode, the development environment, installed on your Mac. It’s included with every MacOS X CD, and it’s also downloadable. It’s HUGE, so you might look around for another utility that sets the hidden bit on files. I had XCode installed already, so I just used that and didn’t both to look elsewhere.
Open up Terminal (in Applications/Utilities). Type the following without pressing RETURN at the end. Also leave a space after the “V”…
```
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V
```
Now, open up the disk volume you’ve been playing with the custom background and icon positions, that you ran AutoOpen on before. Find the name of a file you want to hide (it can also be a folder). Drag and Drop it on the Terminal window. The rest of the command line will be be filled in, and you’ll see something like this (here I dragged the _data folder):
```
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/E3Expo Prospectus/_data/
```
Go ahead and press RETURN now. This will set the INVISIBLE BIT on the file. Do this with the other files you want to hide. If you need to undo the invisible bit, replace the upper-case V with a lower-case v in the command line (use the up/down arrow keys in Terminal to review and edit history).
You’ll probably notice that the files don’t seem to be disappearing right away. Don’t worry about that…it takes MacOS X a while to catch up. We’ll be forcing it to do that in the next few steps.
When everything is done, EJECT the disk volume, then REMOUNT it. You may do this through Disk Utility, which seems more robust than double-clicking the .DMG files directly. My system becomes unstable otherwise.
The files you set to be invisible should now be invisible. You’ll probably want to resize the window and rearrange the remaining icons to make everything pretty.
Move the newly-prettified window to the upper-left corner of your screen. This ensure that the folder will be viewable on machines that don’t have the high resolution that yours has. Close the window, then open it again.
Now use AutoOpen to set the disk volume to Auto Open. Consult the manual for specifics. This will set the disk image to open automatically when inserted, once it’s burned to a CD. If it actually works, send your $10.00 to the author of AutoOpen! [12-15-2006] Apparently AutoOpen has disappeared, but this article has some information about Auto-opening folders by using the following command in Terminal (I’ve modified it to reflect the name I’m using for the Mac disk image): sudo bless -folder "/Volumes/E3Expo Prospectus/" -openfolder "/Volumes/E3Expo Prospectus/" Note: I haven’t tested this yet, but am just writing it here for next time I need to burn a CD.

Toast Prep, Part II — Prepping the Mac Side

Having finished making the mounted disk image exactly the way we want, we’re finally we’re ready to set up the Mac side of the CD. It’s easy: Just click Select Mac… on the Custom Hybrid window in Toast 7.

Select the disk volume you’ve been doing everything to.
Click OK
You’re done!

Burning the CD

I used a CD-RW (rewriteable CD) to test my CDs on both PC and Mac. Keep in mind that CD-RW discs aren’t as fast as regular CDs, so if your application is data-rate sensitive you’ll want to check it on a regular CD-R to get the true sense of how it works. Anyway, click the big red button in the lower right of the screen to burn the CD. It should take just a few minutes.

Testing the Mac Side

Now the exciting part…making sure the damn thing works.

If you have another Macintosh, test on that. If you don’t, make sure your unmount the disk image you selected in Toast first! Otherwise you’ll have two copies of the same volume, and when your CD runs it will grab files from the disk image. You want it to grab files from the CD itself.
Check that the folder is opening automatically when you insert the CD.
Check that the background image is showing up correctly.
While you’re at it, check file names too. Make sure everything’s pretty the way you like it.

Testing the PC Side

Find a different CD that you know works with AutoPlay, and make sure AutoPlay is working. Some PCs do not have functioning AutoPlay. The owner may have turned it off, or AutoPlay has become corrupted by a third-party piece of software. Troubleshooting AutoPlay on a PC is not my idea of fun, so I’ll skip the explanation. If it doesn’t work, find a PC that does have it working. Most CD-based installers for the PC use an Autorun.INF file, so chances are you have a CD you can used to test.
Once you’ve found a PC with working AutoPlay, insert your Hybrid CD in and see if it works. If it doesn’t, double-check the AUTORUN.INF file. You might have screwed up a pathname, left out the [autorun] line at the top of the file, or you didn’t listen and used a Macintosh to create the file with the WRONG line endings. You might have also used a filename with a SPACE in it for the open line. I have done all these things, and they are all irritating things to have happen to you.
If AutoRun does seem to work, then you’re good! Look in My Computer and see if the name of the CD is showing up as how you’ve defined label in autorun.aif. This may be a Windows XP feature…not sure if it’s available on 98, ME, or 2000 (see the end of this doc for my testing notes). Also check that the Icon (the .ICO file specified in the icon line of AutoRun.INF) is showing up.
Double Click the CD-ROM Icon. This should relaunch the application instead of opening a browser window.
Quit the application, and right-click the CD-ROM Icon. Choose EXPLORE from the menu that pops up. You can then view the contents of the CD and make sure everything that’s hidden is supposed to be hidden. If you’ve done your job, the only visible clickable file is the Projector executable. There’s almost no way to mess that up.
Have a beer. Good job.

Wrapping Up

p>If everything looks good, you can master the CD. The CD mastering company just called me and told me they need a physical CDR that has been tested and checked on the target platforms. That is, the CDR I send needs to be tested. Perfect. They duplicate it bit-by-bit. They can accept an image (ISO), but it costs $200 to turn around a check disc.

The format of the CDR: Mac side is HFS (Mac OS Standard, not Extended) , and PC Side is ISO-9660 Mode 1 (Mode 2 is called CD-ROM XA in Toast 7, Mode 1 is just called CD-ROM).

A reader points out that the Mac side of the disc will truncate long filenames to the much-hated 31-character filename limit.

Tags:Gweeping, Tricks

59 Comments

Ben Jackson 19 years ago

Dave, you rule!! This is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
Brad Mowrey 19 years ago

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
davacorp 19 years ago

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)
Dave Seah 19 years ago

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
erg8t 19 years ago

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
erg8t 19 years ago

nermind…
wops head

got it to work after reading Brads post!

a thousand thanks to you all!

o )
Dave Seah 19 years ago

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.
Laura Jaeger 19 years ago

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!
Matt 19 years ago

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.
Dave Seah 19 years ago

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 :-)
Ben Loh 19 years ago

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/
Dave Seah 19 years ago

Hey Ben! Thanks for the bless command use…that’s something I didn’t know! Woot!
Dave Seah 19 years ago

Ben’s writeup on the process has some important additional notes. Thanks for putting them out there, dude!
Joost van der Steen 19 years ago

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…
MRGCAV 19 years ago

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
Dave Seah 19 years ago

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.
Jared 19 years ago

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?
Dave Seah 19 years ago

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…
Tony 18 years ago

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
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
Alex 18 years ago

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
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
Alex 18 years ago

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?
Scott DiAngelis 18 years ago

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.
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
Dave Seah 18 years ago

Came across this clear explanation on AutoRun via Matt Ellis’ site. Noted for future reference.
simon smith 18 years ago

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
John Umina 18 years ago

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!)
Leon Mix 18 years ago

Quick question. Can you use dvd’s as the media for this project?
John Umina 18 years ago

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?
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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)
Paul Cezanne 18 years ago

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
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
FlashGuru 18 years ago

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.
afletch 18 years ago

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!
Simon 18 years ago

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!)
Michael Gallet 18 years ago

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.
Michael Gallet 18 years ago

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.
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
Michael Gallet 18 years ago

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…
adam alexander 18 years ago

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?
Dave Seah 18 years ago

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.
Wayne 18 years ago

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?
John Hudak 18 years ago

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!
Rudi 18 years ago

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?
Peter Lorent 18 years ago

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.
Patchets 18 years ago

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.
Katalog Stron 17 years ago

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
Nicolas Gueguen 17 years ago

Hi !

Great great great tutorial ! Thousand thanks for that !
Anthony Picciano 16 years ago

Great tutorial!

And I do want to mention that the “sudo bless” method of making the disk auto-open is working great.
Ben 16 years ago

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?
Dave Seah 16 years ago

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.
Ben 16 years ago

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!
Clayton 16 years ago

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.
Mozza 15 years ago

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.
Mozza 15 years ago

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.
Christen 14 years ago

http://www.nibfile.com/site/products.php

Auto open is still alive
lost johnny 14 years ago

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….
roberto 13 years ago

YOU ARE THE MAN!!!! thanks a lot from italy. you saved me a bunch of time.