RayB615

Q: iDVD no longer burns, El Capitan

2015 - Retina iMac 16gb ram etc....

 

I am a professional wedding photographer and for years I have been producing and successfully burning dvd slideshows for customers using iDVD.

 

I know it has been discontinued but I cannot find anything as simple to use that produces such good results.

 

Yesterday i update my OS from Yosemite to El Capitan and now I am unable to burn an iDVD project.

 

iDVD opens and works as normal, the burn process starts and halfway through "Processing Images" i get the catherine wheel of death and the software freezes.

 

I have reset SMC and PRAM and deleted .plist and deleted encoded assets in iDVD.

 

I have a 2008 24" intel iMac also now running El Capitan and iDVD appears to be running as normal.

 

As my new iMac is my business machine I need to get this running again. Any suggestions?

 

Ray

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Oct 30, 2015 12:42 PM

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Q: iDVD no longer burns, El Capitan

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  • by RayB615,

    RayB615 RayB615 Nov 17, 2015 8:26 AM in response to itsKeef
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 17, 2015 8:26 AM in response to itsKeef

    Thanks itsKeef.

     

    That really was a detailed answer!

     

    Unfortunately I posted the thread a few weeks ago when I was desperate for a solution so I have bitten the bullet and bought Fotomagico4 and Toast.

     

    Some good results so fa although I agree with you that the Toast Chapter Menus are rubbish!!!

     

    I love the Ken Burns effect with my wedding photos so will carry on this way for the time being.

     

    I always knew iDVD was going to die one day!

     

    Thanks anyway.

     

    Ray.

     

    I have a Blu Ray Player and will definitely try your tips regarding the BMDV and CERT files.

  • by ashlander,

    ashlander ashlander Nov 19, 2015 4:51 PM in response to RayB615
    Level 1 (35 points)
    Nov 19, 2015 4:51 PM in response to RayB615

    I had the same problem but I finally got it to burn a slideshow. I'm not sure what really fixed it. One thing I did was put the project in the movie folder. After making my slideshow, I saved it as a movie in iTunes. Then, found them in the iTunes folder in the iDVD Media Pane.

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad Nov 24, 2015 2:04 PM in response to RayB615
    Level 10 (141,552 points)
    Mac OS X
    Nov 24, 2015 2:04 PM in response to RayB615

    I did some more checking in to the Totiteck software and it's considered malware by many around here. The solution posted by Linc Davis helped a couple of responders in this topic: Totiteck software

     

    OTsig.png

  • by Ziatron,

    Ziatron Ziatron Nov 28, 2015 8:56 PM in response to RayB615
    Level 4 (3,930 points)
    Apple Watch
    Nov 28, 2015 8:56 PM in response to RayB615

    I always knew iDVD was going to die one day!

     

    I use iDVD almost every day.  Many people doing video work suggests doing so using OS 10.9.5.  Although, I've had no problems with iDVD using El Capitan.

  • by Les Wardwell,

    Les Wardwell Les Wardwell Dec 7, 2015 8:55 AM in response to Ziatron
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 7, 2015 8:55 AM in response to Ziatron

    Hi, i just discovered this recently as well. It definitely seems El Capitan has broken the encoding process of iDVD 7.1.2. Nothing to do with burning, just saving to image or video TS folder. The project renders and encodes the menus, then renders the first batch of slides, but as it attempts to encode the first batch of slides it will hang / freeze. Every time. Whacking preferences, cache, re-creating the .dvdproj, changing theme, no around seems to work. :-(

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad Dec 7, 2015 9:09 AM in response to Les Wardwell
    Level 10 (141,552 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 7, 2015 9:09 AM in response to Les Wardwell

    There has to be something amiss with your media as I can encoded slideshows of jpeg images without a problem.

     

    How many slides are in each slideshow?  How big are the images, i.e. pixel dimensions?  Try creating a new project and save as Disk Image or TS Folder again. Try different image files.

     

    Also to confirm that it's not something unique to your user account, log into another user account on your Mac and try to duplicate the project and results there. 

  • by itsKeef,

    itsKeef itsKeef Dec 7, 2015 9:17 AM in response to Les Wardwell
    Level 1 (50 points)
    Dec 7, 2015 9:17 AM in response to Les Wardwell

    now heres a thing...I used an old theme, ok only 15 images but it worked?

    Create a New Project

    16:9

    ignore the default 'Revolution'

    go to old themes

    select 'leather' for example

    change project aspect ratio?...no 'keep'

    works fine.

     

    However if i go with one of the new themes...nope, it hangs.

    my head hurts

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad Dec 7, 2015 9:53 AM in response to itsKeef
    Level 10 (141,552 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 7, 2015 9:53 AM in response to itsKeef

    Is it all of the new themes or just one or two?  I just ran a test and two of the newer themes would not encode the menus.  iDVD quite after about 95% of the encoding of the menu was completed.  The older themes experienced what you're experiencing - freeze at slide 3 transition. 

     

    Something has changed since I last ran iDVD so will have to begin some tests to see what works and what doesn't.

  • by itsKeef,

    itsKeef itsKeef Dec 7, 2015 10:49 AM in response to Old Toad
    Level 1 (50 points)
    Dec 7, 2015 10:49 AM in response to Old Toad

    crazy huh?

    did you try one of the very old ones? I used 'leather'  a very basic 4:3 one...but forced it to stay 16:9

    I must say I only tried the default 7.0 'Revolution' and that froze...will give a good spanking tonight and try a few others with ...say 50 images.

    Lets see what we can break!

  • by Les Wardwell,

    Les Wardwell Les Wardwell Dec 7, 2015 2:28 PM in response to itsKeef
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 7, 2015 2:28 PM in response to itsKeef

    i, too, switched themes from Revolution to a different 7.0. I'll try older. The slideshows are like 50 to 70 each. 2007 iMac, 4 GB RAM, 200+ GB free space. Re-created the project, changed the audio tracks, turned off transitions, even changed around the slideshow and menu orders, but it's always the same, it seems to "randomly" freeze somewhere in the first batch of encoding the slides. I never had any issues until i upgraded to 10.11.

  • by Les Wardwell,

    Les Wardwell Les Wardwell Dec 7, 2015 2:54 PM in response to Les Wardwell
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 7, 2015 2:54 PM in response to Les Wardwell

    i just switched to a 5.0 theme that's always worked in the past. Same freeze. First batch of slide encoding, 10 of 302 total. The report dump is huge, but it's smart enough to know it's an "Event: hang". Just looks like a good ole fashion thread lock.

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad Dec 8, 2015 9:24 AM in response to Les Wardwell
    Level 10 (141,552 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 8, 2015 9:24 AM in response to Les Wardwell

    Update:  I tried burning again today with an older theme, Parchment, @ 4:3  and it froze on slide 11.  Deleted that slide and it went thru.  Added more slides, now at 68, and all is well. 

     

    Then I added the #11 slide back and it saved to disk image just fine.  Switched to 16:9 format in Parchment, tried again and it froze at slide 44 of 69.

     

    Lastly I changed themes to Revolution, 4:3 and successfully saved to disk image.   Changed to 16:9 and it froze, this time at #66.

     

    It appear that the widescreen option in iDVD isn't friendly with El Capitan.  To be fair, the images were not cropped to the 16:9 aspect ratio so don't know if that would affect the compatibility.

  • by Les Wardwell,

    Les Wardwell Les Wardwell Dec 9, 2015 12:43 PM in response to Old Toad
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 9, 2015 12:43 PM in response to Old Toad

    I switched to a 5.0 4:3 theme and re-saved the project and it made it past the first batch of slide encoding, about 181 of 302 and then froze. Trying multiple times it freezes on no particular slide. It just seems 10.11 has exposed a race condition leading to a thread lock. If it works for someone it's just pure timing luck.

  • by Peter Robinson,

    Peter Robinson Peter Robinson Dec 19, 2015 9:51 AM in response to Les Wardwell
    Level 1 (19 points)
    Dec 19, 2015 9:51 AM in response to Les Wardwell

    Same problem, also on 2014 27" retina iMac. Seeing the same random freezing as it was attempting to render images in a slide show. I copied the project and all assets to a 2009 iMac still running 10.10.5 and burned the DVD with no problem. I noticed that it rendered the images much faster than had been happening on the newer, faster machine, even before the freeze happened. I guess I won't be upgrading that other iMac!

  • by Les Wardwell,

    Les Wardwell Les Wardwell Dec 22, 2015 6:59 AM in response to Peter Robinson
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Dec 22, 2015 6:59 AM in response to Peter Robinson

    The only workaround I have found, since i believe this is a real thread lock bug, is to export your photo slide show from iPhoto as a 1080p slideshow .m4v file. I then just add that .m4v file as a movie menu item in my iDVD project. I used my same theme and even 16:9. I created my usual main menu screen and just added each .m4v movie link per slideshow i had exported from iPhoto. Save as disc image and it works because the blocking issue was encoding a slideshow in iDVD. This workaround there are no slideshows, only "movies" and they are a different encoding asset. Then just double click your .img file and it will mount, then just right click the mounted image and burn to disc.

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