I've DVDR-ed a show on National Geographic Channel that my dad wants to see, and I'm trying to remove the commercials.
Has the DVD content been imported to iMovie '08 in an "editable" compression format or are you trying to edit it in QT Pro? If the latter, even with the QT MPEG-2 Playback component installed, "muxed" file formats are not editable nor do they generally retain audio during conversion.
When I select the stuff I want removed, "Trim to Selection" is greyed out. Any idea how I can get rid of the commercials?
Once again in QT Pro this could either indicate you are attempting to edit a "playback" only compression format or don't have "in" and "out" points properly set. In iMovie '08 it could indicate you are trying to edit an "event" clip and not a "project" clip. In addition, if the "Trim to Selection" option were to work, it would be deleting everything but what you selected which you said was what you wanted to remove.
There are many work work flows that can be applied here:
1) You could use a "Project Additive" approach. By this I mean you can expand the Event window clips so that they show half-second time segment icons which display the actual frame currently under the "play head" and drag-select non-commercial segments you want to move to your project window.
2) You can also use a number of "Project Subtractive" approaches:
a) One would be to drag an entire clip to the Project window and then selectively eliminate everything you don't want. In this case you can either select a segment you don't want (a commercial) and use the "Cut" or "Delete Selection" Edit menu option to dispose of it.
b) You could simply scrub the playhead through the entire cut and use the "Split" option to "divide" the clip into commercial and non-commercial segments and then go through and discard all of the commercials by selecting its segments and simply pressing the delete key to remove them one-by-one from the project leaving only the material you wish to keep.
c) A third method would be to repeatedly import a clip, select a new segment you want to keep, and then use the "Trim to Selection" option to remove everything but the selected segment.
Both QT Pro and MPEG Streamclip would allow you to add a clip to the player, scrub the play head to an approximate point, use arrow keys to "single frame" the play head to an exact frame which could be marked with an "i" or "o" key to set "in" and "out" points which would highlight a segment which you could then "cut" from your clip, saving what is finally left by using the "Save As..." File menu option. This approach has the advantage of not having to "re-compress" your file an additional time as you will have to do in iMovie '08.
