iDVD 4:

After wasting five days in non-productivity trying to get iDVD 4 to work, here's a summary of my thoughts - well, the ones that are fit for polite company anyway - in case they might help lead humanity forwards in any way.

The problem:

Bottom line:

- someone who I have known for many years as a balanced and experienced Mac-guru writes

"I'm beginning to wonder if we don't have some sort of early emergency release, and the 'real' version is still in the can and pending"

- an apple user of 13 years writes

"I have never seen anything like this. It is quite out of the ordinary for Apple to have these issues."

- another experienced user adds

"iDVD4 ... just does not work for any of my projects. However, since getting DVD Studio Pro 2 I've had no trouble at all making DVDs. It's fast, reliable, and the progress bar is even accurate. So for all of us who can't make iDVD4 work, don't worry, your computer is fine, just wait for an update."

iDVD 4 can also take iDVD 3 with it: I and others can't even revert to the functionality we had before, because since installing iDVD 4, iDVD 3 consistently gets stuck at the point when it says it has 12 minutes to go, and nothing more happens all night long.

Ways towards a solution

Just the list of topics on the discussion pages for iDVD on Apple's web-site takes up 28 pages - though to put things in perspective, iMovie and DVD Studio Pro have 23 each, Garage Band already has 20, and iTunes for Mac has as many as 34.

I haven't worked through more than the 50 topics listed on the first page, but there I found these pearls:

• it works if you start iDVD4 as the first and only program, i.e. you can't do anything else while iDVD is encoding or burning - even Norton needs to be deactivated
  • [if you don't want to lose your list of start-up items, I guess you could create a new user for yourself without any: at the moment I have Panther installed on two different hard discs with different settings, one just for iDVD 4 - absurd!]
• when you've finished editing, you restart the Mac and then select 'burn' without doing anything more to your project, not even playing it!
• you need at least 10 Gb free on the start-up disc, preferably 15-25 Gb; empty space on some other disc will not do instead
  • [but my experience was that the program itself doesn't need to be on the start-up disc]
• it's possible that there are more reports of successful burns from Jaguar users than Panther users
• "the quality of what iDVD 4 produces is outstanding"
• the better the quality the longer the processing time, so it's natural that iDVD 4 takes much longer than iDVD 3
• the indication of how long the various processes will need to complete were unreliable in DVD 3, and it was considered better to remove the function all together in iDVD 4
• encoding (done once however many discs you make) takes three or four times as long as the duration of the movie; the actual length of time depends on many factors, including chapter markers, menus, transitions etc.
• after that, multiplexing and burning (repeated for each disc) can take over an hour for a two-hour movie at 1x speed, half that at 2x, a quarter at 4x speed
• encoding in the background is an option if your project is less than 60 minutes long and you choose 'best performance ' over 'best quality'; otherwise there is no encoding going on until you hit the 'burn' button
• the total time your animated menus can take up is 15 minutes: the program doesn't warn you if you try to exceed that, it just reduces things to fit the total in some way it sees fit
• 'DVD Studio Pro 2 is fast, reliable, and the progress bar is even accurate' ...

My own tests

I did one little test project in Final Cut Pro, barely a minute long, three clips each with their own chapter-marker: and in fact I got a result that worked as it should, even using a humble Princo disc costing 80¢:

• with 'Best performance' and 'enable background encoding', background encoding works just as it had in iDVD3 ... :-)
• however, once I saw it start to work on its own, I watched while it did it, and it took several minutes = several times the film's duration
• and still iDVD 4 started encoding again for several minutes after I hit 'burn' = several times the film's duration
• and the whole thing took about c:a 10 minutes = ten times the film's duration:

It looked lovely; but is it really supposed to take 20 hours to do the two-hour movie which is why I bought the product, time during which you can't do anything else on the Mac? - you haven't the faintest indication whether it's ten minutes or ten hours you will have to spend away from your Mac, nor even if the thing is working or not. How on earth anyone at Apple can think that people in the real world can tie up their working tools for more than the sleeping night, and will continue to be satisfied and loyal if they don't get to influence the course of things which affect their lives so much, is a mystery to me.

More about the problems:

I tried three different kinds of disc, re-installed Panther on a new hard disc, reinstalled iDVD4 and iDVD3, restarted 500 times: and still, got these apparent dysfunctions with iDVD4:

• after 14 hours the program hasn't finished churning away at an 80-minute film, with never the slightest indication how much longer it might need or indeed whether it's going forwards at all, or has frozen: and afterwards it turns out that the disc is still in virgin condition.
• the iLife installer says I absolutely should install QT 6.5, but the QT installer refuses to install anything, with the reason that the version which is already installed - identified by the QT Prefs as 6.4 - is newer ...
• even though I have not chosen 'delete encoded files', the program starts to encode from zero again every time I hit 'burn' with the same project, and it has evidently not saved anything from the previous times.

Even if it produced a result, I can't tie up my Mac for endless and unspecified hours at a time; and although Toast is fine for what it does, it doesn't give me what I need: so personally, I decided to go for DVD Studio Pro 2, having found an affordable price via eBay ...

Delightful, empowering:	Great promises not fulfilled, and five days wasted:	Fine for what it does:	The smooth - and via eBay even affordable! - solution:	Capturing video and making a DVD in Mac OS Panther
iDVD3	iDVD 4	Toast 6	DVD Studio Pro 2	One user's solutions