Dvd keeps ejecting during multiplexing and burning in idvd

I am not using final cut or iMovie, only iDVD. No photos, no audio except what is part of the video file. The video files I have tried to burn include .mov, .avi, m4v, but mostly avi. Mp4 did not work at all, not readable by idvd or anything else except vlcc player. They play just fine in QuickTime. Also, the same files burned just fine to DVD previously, even as recently as two weeks ago. Yet now they will not. Last night I used iDVD to make a disc image. Then I tried burning with disk utility. I got an error message. Next I tried with toast. Medium sense key error message. I do not think this problem is related to the content, i have used idvd many times! i'm doing exactly the same things as before, only now, its broken! I am starting to wonder if my drive is just bad. It always burns successfully the first ten minutes then quits.

The only thing I can think of that might have caused this change is right before these problems started, I was doing some maintenance and I ran a repair disc permissions and deleted some files off my computer to free up disc space. One file i had labeled codecs and, although I thought it was not being used, do you suppose this could be the reason? Afterwards, I began having burn problems although I did make a couple successful DVDs while troubleshooting... They would play on the regular DVD player but not the Xbox or ps2. Now I can't even do that. I wonder, did my drive begin to fail, sputter out a last few partially readable DVDs, then just give out altogether? If it burns at all, then it should be able to burn all the way, right?

Ok. Some progress has been made. I purchased an external DVD drive off amazon and used disk utility to burn one of the disk images I created in idvd to DVD. Worked perfectly. Movie (which was an 89 minute .avi file, originally) played fine in regular DVD player, Xbox, and ps2. So, i am thinking that the problem was a partial hardware failure after all. Not too surprising since my iMac was purchased from a previous owner who, though he took really good care, probably put some use on the SuperDrive. Combined with what I have done with it, it probably just wore out. have not yet tried burning a movie straight from idvd because NOW idvd keeps freezing up on me, usually after I have added the video to my idvd project. It works fine then suddenly, rainbow wheel forever. Over and over, the same thing. Sometimes it just abruptly crashes and the program closes. I did not use to experience this problem before so this tells me, something's still not right with my precious iMac. Grrrrrr. But, I WILL get to the bottom of this!

Not sure with this new problem if I will even be able to create more disk images for burning.

I believe I have finally fixed the problem but I am going to post what I went through just in case someone else ever runs into these same issues, maybe I can save them some time. I went through so much troubleshooting and each problem solved seemed to result in new problems, so, let me recap.

First, computer was working fine. Burned a DVD, it worked. Then a few days later, tried to burn another DVD. It didn't work. I tried different brands of discs, different types of discs, (-r and +r) sometimes there was a partial burn, sometimes no luck at all and an unusable, unplayable disc. The disc would eject early during the burning phase, giving me simultaneous contradictory messages that it was both "done" and had " about one minute left".

I tried running a verify/ repair disk permissions. Everything came out fine, but still no burned DVDs. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling idvd. I tried a cleaning disc. Still no go. Sometimes idvd would crash or freeze on me or give me error messages. Result varied depending on what i tried, but were never good.

Then I bought an external drive and tried saving my DVD project as a disc image and burning with toast as many people have suggested. This worked! So, I concluded that my SuperDrive was faulty but I'm not going to bother getting it replaced right now because the external works just fine. I thought my problem was finally solved, but then...

I noticed that upon restarting, my computer would display a white-gray screen as is normal, with the familiar apple symbol, but now a new addition: a very annoying loading bar that took 5-10 minutes to load. Unacceptable!!! Also, I noticed shortly after that iTunes did not work. It wouldn't even open, but crashed due to an error and asked if it could send a report. I tried deleting and uninstalling iTunes but that didn't work.

I ran another verify disc permissions with disc utility, and I got a very bad error message. It said there were errors on the drive and it could not be repaired and it said I needed to start up from the Mac OS X install disc and use disc utility to repair the volume. Problem with that...my install disc says it can't install on this computer. I soon learned from one (finally) helpful apple support guy that the reason for this was that I am running snow leopard 10.6.8 and the disc that came with my computer was for 10.5.2 or something.

On a side note: I had called apple support before and specifically asked if the reason the disc didn't work was because it was for a different version and the guy said he had no idea if that was the reason or not. Jerk. CLEARLY, that was the reason and my ignorant butt didn't know any better and he wanted me to pay 19.99 just to answer that question for me.

So, I went to the apple store and purchased snow leopard. It was delivered today, I started my computer from the new snow leopard disc and repaired my drive. Restarted. A bit slow restarting but no more loading bar and not as bad as before...iTunes still didn't work but I completely uninstalled a reinstalled it again and this time it seems to be working fine. Idvd is working, I saved another movie to disc might. And am assuming it will still burn fine with toast in the external drive.

During my arduous troubleshooting I discovered that I most probably have the seagate 1 tb hard drive that was recalled by apple due to its tendency to fail...whether this has been the root of my computer's troubles from the start, I still don't know for sure. But, everything seems to be functioning correctly now at least and since my computer has lasted this long without hard drive failures, maybe it will be ok. It's possible that I somehow caused the errors while I was fiddling around on the computer trying to fix idvd and iTunes. Hope this is helpful to somebody, someday. I did gain a lot of advice from various forums on the web and found many people having one or more of the issues I was running into, so I thought I should record my process here for others as well.