iDVD hangs when burning project

Could be just a problem with low free space on your boot hard drive. How much free space do you have on that drive? After a few years, hard drives do tend to fill up.


Something on the order of 20 to 25 GB would be a sort of minimum.

How large are your still photos? If they are large (say 10 to 12 megapixels) that can cause problems.

I suggest you resize your still images to 720x540 for 4:3 NTSC or 854x480 for widescreen NTSC (or 768x576 for 4:3 PAL or 1024x576 for widescreen PAL).



Also, rather than burning to a writable disc, make your burn to a disk image file (an option under FILE in iDVD). You can then double-click to mount the disk image .img file on your desktop and open Apple's DVD Player application to play it. If it's fine, you then use Apple's Disk Utility to burn the disk image to a writable DVD.

iDvd likes lots of elbow space. So hopefully that 20 GB's you mentioned above does the trick but if not ... things to consider removing for more HDD space from your boot volume / HDD would be items like completed iMovie and iDvd project files. If you have a vast collection of photos & videos; burning them to dvd helps as does using Monolingual to clear languages other than English (if you can afford to do so). The latter will clear about 500 MB's from the main HD .....

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/monolingual.html


Btw, please use caution when running Monolingual. If you opt to download and run Monolingual, and delete unneeded items from the /Library/Printers/, /Library/Packages/, and /Library/Updates/ folders then DO NOT use Monolingual to delete architectures on any Intel Mac. (you'll thank me later and so will your keyboard).

Hope this helps but if not just come on back.





Message was edited by: SDMacuser

Now you have an image file, open Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder) and click on the yellow and black burn button; then drag-and-drop your .img into the Disk Utility window. You will be all set to burn to writable media.

failed to burn because of medium write error.

OK, now we know your problem isn't iDVD!

What brand media are you using? Verbatim and Maxell and good.

TDK and Memorex don't have a good track record here.


It's also possible that using a DVD cleaning disc to clean off your drive optical system might help, but I'd bet on the media.

Do you have a can of compressed air handy?

'Canned air' - That's a risky approach. I don't recommend it's use in a DVD drive.

My wife has the very same mac. I've used the approach successfully on her mac also.
And I'm prepared to outline a safe approach.


It's not like I'm going to help him void his warranty given the age of his laptop. But if he feels like you that too much risk is involed, then attach an external burner and go from there ... if the ext. burner works fine then he has nothing to loose with a quick shot of compressed air at a safe distance. And it just might help.

Message was edited by: SDMacuser