Friday, December 24, 2004

Burning DVD's with iDVD

For those of you at work on Christmas Eve trying to burn a DVD for your wife to give to a friend of hers as a gift, let me give you some recommendations after you've seen iDVD crash three times on your G5 without even starting to burn. (How's that for a quality run-on sentence? That's so fine, I think I'll just leave it in here).


a) Throwing the computer out the window in flames to tumble all 11 floors down to the parking garage is not the answer. Even though it may look really cool, it will probably result in a pink slip.

b) Re-installing iDVD from scratch is a good thing. It appears to fix things up great. Make sure you immediately update to 4.0.1 without ever launching it. Why this works, I do not know. Usually I look at recommendations like this in user to user forums with great skeptism right along with "rebooting", "repairing permissions" and the best one "redo-prebinding". This time however, it does appear to be working (ie I haven't crashed yet).

c) Last but definately not least, uncompress this file into your home directory. Believe it or not, this exposes an easter egg that allows you to make iDVD save to a disk image. When you go to burn, control click on the burn button instead of just normally clicking on it, and this gives you the option of burning to a disk image. Even better, you can mount these disk images and play them in the standard Apple DVD app to check your "DVD" before you actually burn it using the Disk Utility. No more frisbees! I wonder which Apple Engineer let that little egg out...and why Apple hasn't allowed this feature all the time?

Anyways, a couple of hundred transitions to go, and then I'm out of here ;-)

Happy Holidays all!

1 comment:

Dave said...

Arrggh! It just crashed again. For some reason it seems to be working fine on the dual g4 down the hall.