Make a DVD without menus?

(From fellow poster Mishmumken: )

How to create a DVD in iDVD without menu (there are several options):

1. Easy: Drop your iMovie in the autoplay box in iDVD's Map View, then set your autoplay item (your movie) to loop continously. Disadvantage: The DVD plays until you hit stop on the remote

2. Still easy: If you don't want your (autoplay) movie to loop, you can create a black theme by replacing the background of a static theme with a black background and no content in the dropzone (text needs to be black as well). Disadvantage: The menu is still there and will play after the movie. You don't see it, but your disc keeps spinning in the player.

3. Still quite easy but takes more time: Export the iMovie to DV tape, and then re-import using One-Step DVD.

Disadvantage: One-Step DVD creation has been known to be not 100% reliable.

4. (My preferred method) Easy enough but needs 3rd party software: Roxio Toast lets you burn your iMovie to DVD without menu - just drag the iMovie project to the Toast Window and click burn. Disadvantage: you'll need to spend some extra $$ for the software. In Toast, you just drop the iMovie project on the Window and click Burn.

5. The "hard way": Postproduction with myDVDedit (freeware)

Tools necessary: myDVDedit ( http://www.mydvdedit.com )

• create a disc image of your iDVD project, then double-click to mount it.

• Extract the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders to a location of your choice. select the VIDEO_TS folder and hit Cmd + I to open the Inspector window

• Set permissions to "read & write" and include all enclosed items; Ignore the warning.

• Open the VIDEO_TS folder with myDVDedit. You'll find all items enclosed in your DVD in the left hand panel.

• Select the menu (usually named VTS Menu) and delete it

• Choose from the menu File > Test with DVD Player to see if your DVD behaves as planned.If it works save and close myDVDedit.

• Before burning the folders to Video DVD, set permissions back to "read only", then create a disc image burnable with Disc Utility from a VIDEO_TS folder using Laine D. Lee's DVD Imager:

http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee/applescript/dvdimager.html

Several of our resident experts also recommend this: there is a 3rd export/share option that give better results. That's to use the Share ➙ Media Browser menu option. Then in iDVD go to the Media Browser and drag the movie into iDVD where you want it.

If you are using iMovie 9 see also this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5543?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

iDVD is on it's death bed. It's become more and more incompatible with the system. Personally, I'd try one of the available video DVD authoring apps that are available thru the App Store.

There is one app, DVD Maker Lite - DVD Creator, which is a free demo version (puts a watermark on the resulting slideshow) that can take both still photos or video/movie files to create slideshow presentations.

It can easily make a no menu or black menu presentation and have the presentation auto start.

You have to set the movie as First Play.

Follow this workflow to help assure the best qualty video DVD:

Once you have the project as you want it save it as a disk image via the File ➙ Save as Disk Image menu option. This will separate the encoding process from the burn process.

To check the encoding mount the disk image, launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding is good.

Then burn to disk with Disk Utility at the slowest speed available (2x-4x) to assure the best burn quality. Always use top quality media: Verbatim, Maxell or Taiyo Yuden DVD-R are the most recommended in these forums.

I use the Adobe suite to create my DVDs and Blu-ray disks, so I'm no iDVD expert, but I'll take a shot at it.

From what I've found, OneStep is a shortcut to create a DVD while directly connected to the digital camcorder, using it as the source. I would guess what's happening is iDVD is losing it's connection to the camera and quitting.

Copy the video from the camera to your Mac and try it from there.

Don't know if it will help, but I found instructions for using OneStep in iDVD here.