iDVD not responding
Thanks to the help and advise received here, I finally was able to get around the "iDVD not responding" problems and produce a Disk Image for my DVD project.
Before going into details I would like address Apple's responsibility for the "iDVD not Responding" problem. Actually it's not a problem but the result of Apple ignoring their own user interface guidelines. While burning a DVD and during the "Audio Encoding" phase iDVD appears to hang. Force Quit, iDVD dock icon and the Activity monitor all report that "iDVD not responding. The burn button stops and the spinning beach ball goes on forever. All indications are that the iDVD has crashed. This can go on for hours (as long as 6 to 8 hours). After being frozen all this time the encoding finishes and the DVD is burned. This has to be fixed.
OK! Here are the details and observations. I'm working on a iDVD project with three 25 minutes movies. I'm using a G4 AGP with a 1.4 GHz upgrade, 896 MB memory and iDVD 6.
As the project starts it encodes the DVD menus and transitions. It then encodes the movie 1 video which takes some some. However, the progress bar moves and the preview window changes. It then goes on to encode movie 1 audio and "hangs." This goes on for about two hours and then moves on to movie 2 and movie 3.
The only indication that something is happening is there's disk activity, the CPU is being used and the file in .dvdproj name tempmovie grows in size. I thank Paul Dwaite on this board for this for this most helpful hint. This convinced me that the project did not crash.
I use a program called Menu Meters that adds network activity, memory used and free, disk activity and CPU usage to the menu bar. I observed that as the audio encoding progressed and the file tempmovie grew the memory used also grew to about 500 MB. I wonder is I were to add more memory, would it speed up the process?
Unlike previous versions of iDVD if you force quit during the encoding process, anything that is already encoded is not lost. The video is fully recovered and will be skipped over when you re-burn. Any completed audio encoding will be kept and used and the incomplete audio encoding will pickup where it was left off.
iDVD is still a great program but Apple needs to fix these problems.
Before going into details I would like address Apple's responsibility for the "iDVD not Responding" problem. Actually it's not a problem but the result of Apple ignoring their own user interface guidelines. While burning a DVD and during the "Audio Encoding" phase iDVD appears to hang. Force Quit, iDVD dock icon and the Activity monitor all report that "iDVD not responding. The burn button stops and the spinning beach ball goes on forever. All indications are that the iDVD has crashed. This can go on for hours (as long as 6 to 8 hours). After being frozen all this time the encoding finishes and the DVD is burned. This has to be fixed.
OK! Here are the details and observations. I'm working on a iDVD project with three 25 minutes movies. I'm using a G4 AGP with a 1.4 GHz upgrade, 896 MB memory and iDVD 6.
As the project starts it encodes the DVD menus and transitions. It then encodes the movie 1 video which takes some some. However, the progress bar moves and the preview window changes. It then goes on to encode movie 1 audio and "hangs." This goes on for about two hours and then moves on to movie 2 and movie 3.
The only indication that something is happening is there's disk activity, the CPU is being used and the file in .dvdproj name tempmovie grows in size. I thank Paul Dwaite on this board for this for this most helpful hint. This convinced me that the project did not crash.
I use a program called Menu Meters that adds network activity, memory used and free, disk activity and CPU usage to the menu bar. I observed that as the audio encoding progressed and the file tempmovie grew the memory used also grew to about 500 MB. I wonder is I were to add more memory, would it speed up the process?
Unlike previous versions of iDVD if you force quit during the encoding process, anything that is already encoded is not lost. The video is fully recovered and will be skipped over when you re-burn. Any completed audio encoding will be kept and used and the incomplete audio encoding will pickup where it was left off.
iDVD is still a great program but Apple needs to fix these problems.
G4 AGP upgrade to 1.4 GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.5), 896 MB Memory
