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iDVD - Easily create professional-looking DVD projects Pick of the Week
iDVD iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Although I wrote a mini-review of iDVD2 just over a year ago, it's never been featured as a Pick of the Week, which is a bit of an oversight on my part. This weekend I had the chance to use it quite a bit again, and my time with iDVD helped remind me that it's a very impressive piece of software.

iDVD takes away nearly all the complexity behind creating a professional looking DVD project. Although iDVD may not meet the neets of people who make a living creating DVDs (that's what DVD Studio Pro is for!), for nearly everyone else, it should be more than sufficient. iDVD includes a number of very sharp pre-made themes, and allows you to easily create themes of your own. You can have full motion menus, background music, slide shows, and choose from a number of unique button styles, all wrapped in an easy to understand interface. When I used it for the first time last year, I had my first project ready to burn in something less than an hour.

iDVD isn't perfect - there are some niggling glitches with font displays, the handling of slide shows could be improved (there's a 99 slide limit per folder), and you give up a certain amount of creative freedom in exchange for the ease of use (but that's a tradeoff I'll gladly make any day!). But overall, just like iMovie before it, iDVD puts a tool in the general consumer's hands that gives them the abilities that, prior to its release, could only be had in a Pro-level product (with a matching Pro-level degree of complexity).

With the newly announced Superdrive-equipped Titanium PowerBooks, the universe of potential iDVD users has just increased, and hopefully more people will get a chance to see what a nice job Apple has done with this software ... and I can't wait to see what iDVD3 brings to the party, whenever it gets here!
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iDVD - Easily create professional-looking DVD projects | 14 comments | Create New Account
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iDVD2
Authored by: YoramIH on Nov 25, '02 06:36:21AM

I was VERY disappointed in the image quality of the DVD's created in PAL format. It is much less than the original DV or when encoded with QT Pro and multiplexed with DVD Studio Pro. Is there a difference in quality between NTSC and PAL? Will the quality improve with iDVD3. I certainly hope so, because a an iApp I like it very much.



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iDVD2
Authored by: gboy on Nov 25, '02 06:54:02AM

There was a company selling the external AO4 drive that included a patch to make iDVD work on external drives. Anyone know anything more abut this?



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Cease and decist...
Authored by: robg on Nov 25, '02 07:51:12AM

Apple asked them to stop shipping the patch, and they did so. I can't remember the name of the company involved, though...

-rob.



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Cease and decist...
Authored by: smv on Nov 25, '02 09:25:58AM

The company was formac. Now they just ship proprietary burning software that (from the looks of their web site) can only support a single movie on a DVD.

-smv



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Cease and decist...
Authored by: Fofer on Nov 25, '02 10:07:13AM

Nope - Formac has always sold their own proprietary software with their Devideon DVD-R. The "other" company that sold a patch to let iDVD work with their external DVD-R's was Other World Computing. They have since pulled the patch, due to Apple's demands. Apple wants people who desire to burn DVD's easily with iDVD to buy a whole new computer from APPLE, not a $300 peripheral from OWC.



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Cease and decist...
Authored by: jfaughnan on Nov 25, '02 11:16:58PM

I'd thought this was pretty rotten of Apple too. I don't mind paying a modest premium for their hardware as a surrogate for paying for software, but you can't BUY an external DVD burner from Apple!

I'm told that the story behind this is more intricate than it seems. Apple licenses the compression software used in iDVD. If you buy their hardware then you're covered under the license. If you buy someone else's hardware then you're not covered. It MAY be that the owner of the compression algorithm pressured Apple to put out the cease and desist.

This doesn't get Apple off the hook though. They would serve their customers best by selling an Apple labeled DVD burner that iDVD supported. One wonders why they don't.

john



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Cease and decist...NOT TRUE
Authored by: turkchgo on Nov 26, '02 10:04:11AM

What's being said here and one post above isn't entirely true. You can buy a Pioneer A04 DVD drive and iDVD will work with it just fine. No patch required. I've been doing it for a year on my dual 450 G4.

Getting a copy of iDVD is the hard part. If your Apple didn't ship with a super drive, you can't just go and download iDVD.

However, if you can find a copy of iDVD you can also pay Apple $20 to get the iDVD 2.0 upgrade and viaola, you have a superdrive equipped PowerMac with iDVD for about $330, oh, yeah, plus the original purchase price of your older power mac.



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iDVD2
Authored by: mdzorn on Nov 25, '02 11:35:05AM

It depends on the length of the movie. In NTSC iDVD can put 60 minutes (4.7Gb) of video on the disc or 90 minutes (~7.5Gb). The difference in video quality is quite noticeable and due to the different rates of compression. The disc itself holds the same amount of data since iDVD can only burn one side of the disc. Professional DVD software includes other compression schemes that deliver better quality at high rates of compression.
With 60 minutes, iDVD provides very good video quality.



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other iApps
Authored by: davidnorton on Nov 25, '02 08:33:33AM

Is it just me, or is Apple not spending enough time getting some of it's apps working correctly? iTunes rocks... iMovie too... I haven't tried iDVD but I've heard it's fantastic. But iPhoto, iCal, iChat, and Mail, although they are pretty and have some nice features, all leave a lot to be desired. Apple should hire a few more guys working on their iApps, in my opinion. It would go a long way towards building brand loyalty if the apps mentioned were as perfect as iTunes.



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other iApps
Authored by: chabig on Nov 25, '02 10:07:39AM

I agree, in principle. But remember that iTunes is now at version 3. iMovie is at version 2. All of the other iApps you mentioned are still version 1.X.

Chris



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other iApps
Authored by: davidnorton on Nov 25, '02 03:54:54PM

That's a good point. And iTunes, which was great even at 1.0, had been SoundJam MP for years before.

In that case, I can't wait for iPhoto 2 and iCal 2! :-) Hopefully their strategy isn't to release all that software with system upgrades (i.e., iPhoto 2 for Mac OS X 10.3 or later, only)



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Don't know....
Authored by: balthisar on Nov 25, '02 11:36:56AM

...if my problem is an iDVD problem or an Apex problem. This is the problem: DVD's made with animated main menus that loop trigger the Apex to signal parental control violations right at the point the animation is to repeat. No commercial DVD's do this to my Apex player. The iDVD-made disks work okay on the old RCA player in the bedroom, though.



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Don't know....
Authored by: Trunkmonkey on Sep 08, '03 10:16:17PM

I can't get any iDVD authored discs to play on any of my Apex DVD players. Ohwell...



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99 slides per folder
Authored by: c.j. moof on Nov 25, '02 06:12:17PM

Don't write this up as a "fault" in iDVD, 99 is a common limitation in the DVD specifications. DVD is limited to 99 chapters per track, 99 tracks per disc, and 99 assets per slideshow, no matter what software you author in.

If 99 slides isn't enough, you'll have to split them into multiple slideshows.



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