an error occurred during movie encoding

Not sure what's going on. But I would try deleting encoded assets (from the iDVD Advanced menu) and try burning again.

Also, instead of trying your burn from iDVD, try saving your project as a Disk Image, an option on the iDVD File menu) and burn from the disk image using the Utilities/Disk Utility menu. When you open the Disk Utility window your project should be listed in the left side panel. If it is not there, drag it in. Then select the project and hit the burn button. You want to burn at 4x speed or lower. On my computer, burning with disk utility defaults to 4x speed, whereas when you burn from iDVD you can't adjust the burn speed.

Finally, make sure that you have sufficient disk space to do a burn. 5 GB is the absolute minimum, but you should have at least 10GB and more if possible.

Hi

Deleting the pref file ?

I would start a new User/account and log into this and have a re-try.

200+Gb on hard disk ? On the internal (booth/start-up) hard disk ? Others doesn't count.

Yours Bengt W

Hi dradams!

If I understand this thread correctly, your problem if with audio encoding?

Disregard any messages that iDVD is not responding. It is. Do not force quit.

Encoding audio is the slowest part of rendering, and can take many hours. Great patience, even an intermittent alternative hobby, is called for.

Make sure no other application is running, make sure you have not set the hard disk to go to sleep and that the screen saver will not come on. Leave it overnight, or have a 36 hole game of golf.

Sooner or later iDVD will finish!

Apple confirms the foregoing in this Knowledge Base Article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2316

Not all of that applies in your case. You don't say what the source of the audio was. If it was purchased tracks in iTunes then, because of DRM copy protection it will not work in iDVD UNTIL you have gone through the standard work-around, which is:

Select the tracks in iTunes that you wish to use. Burn them to a CD. Re-import those tracks from that CD back into iTunes and save them as AIFF files. Only use those new tracks in iDVD.

Now they will work flawlessly, but like I said at the beginning, audio rendering takes longer than video rendering!

I understand.

Have we established what brand of DVDs you are using?

Most of here recommend Verbatim or Fuji, and some also Maxell.

What burn speed are you using?

2x or 4x works best. If you save the iDVD project as a Disk Image and burn that, you will be able to select the burn speed.

The following diagnostic link might help:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1583?viewlocale=en_US

The other responders have given some pretty good information. I have found that sometimes it can be something simple that causes a burn to fail, like exceeding the 15 minute duration for menu items, or using audio from iTunes, or interfering 3rd party or Quicktime plug-ins. I don't know whether any of these apply to you.

Is your Quicktime up to date?

Have you done a permissions repair? Deleted preferences? Run a disk repair? I think that Bengt mentioned these, but I don't know whether you did them.

If your project is stored on an external disk, is it formatted for Apple?

Have you tried burning a short test project to see if the problem persists? If it works, see what was different in that project versus your initial one. It may be something in your content.