iDVD Workaround for High Sierra (APFS)

Hello Everybody,

Like many of you, my iDVD was beachballing during the encoding process. After digging around in the console, I found the culprit. In my case, it happens to be APFS. iDVD doesn't know how to talk APFS, so it freezes during processing with an "unsupported compression" error. There is a workaround, however, and that is to move iDVD, its theme folder, and your project to an HFS partition:

Easiest Method (Using an External Drive)

1. Plug in an external drive that's formatted as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled).

2. Copy iDVD, the Themes folder located at "/Applications/Library Support/iDVD/", and your project to the external disk.

3. Delete the original Themes folder and replace it with an alias of your copy on the HFS+ disk.

Harder Method (If You Don't Have an External Drive)

1. Open Disk Utility and select "New Image -> Blank Image..." from the File menu.

2. Set the image type to "sparse disk image" and the format to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)."

3. For the size, you'll need to set it to something fairly large. For a sparse image, this is actually the size limit, not the amount of space it is currently using. So, you'll want to set it something like 100 GB or 1 TB or whatever -- large enough that it won't run out of space when rendering all the assets. In the end, it'll only use as much as it needs.

4. After the disk image is created and mounted on your desktop, follow steps 2 and 3 of the "Easiest Method", copying the items to the disk image.

Congrats. You can now use iDVD again on an APFS Mac.