Wesley's Tool-Box

Mac mini, as with any Macs you buy today, comes with great tools for creating and watching DVDs out of the box. You would edit the video on iMovie HD, then use iDVD to prepare the menus and burn the actual DVD. Later, the DVD can be watched using an application appropriately named 'DVD Player'. But I hit a couple of annoying snags while creating an extremely long DVD.

First off, my Mac mini's SuperDrive is not double-layer capable and this was a problem. See, iDVD won't create projects that can fit into a double-layer DVD unless your Mac has a DVD burner capable of burning a double-layer DVD. While the new version of iDVD (that is, version 5) added the option of burning the DVD as an image file, I would need to be able to create a double-layer project first if I wanted to fill up the full capacity of a double-layer DVD using an external DVD burner.



Fortunately, HardMac has a patch file that enables double-layer DVD option regardless of the internal drive's capability. I used the patch and I could select 'Double Layer' as seen above.

After making the project fit exactly as 240:00, or 4 hours flat, I started creating the DVD image. The encoding process was pretty slow - my overclocked Mac mini (1.58GHz) was barely managing 1/3 the realtime encoding speed.



After the video portion was encoded, it entered the audio encoding. But after a short while, an apparent problem surfaced. The spinning 'Burn' icon stopped, and the cursor was turned into the scary spinning beachball. It looked like iDVD froze up. I wondered what the problem was, and I found that I wasn't alone. It was likely that iDVD was just encoding audio fine in the background, but taking quite a long time. So I checked the disk activity and temporary files.

It turned out that iDVD was indeed encoding audio. Not only was my external drive containing the data being constantly accessed, the /tmp/tempmovie.mov file, which is used to store the encoded data, was growing with time. After three hours of waiting, iDVD suddenly came back to life and finished creating the image.

Had my difficulties stopped here it would've saved a lot of time. It wasn't to be the case. The Apple DVD Player decided to take its turn at torture. To verify that the DVD image I created was properly made, I ran the DVD Player application. For the most part it looked alright, and I was almost ready to burn the image, but then towards the end of the DVD, the video became corrupt and audio became muted. The image must've become corrupt. Damn.

So I re-encoded the video, but the same corruption occurred. I re-edited the iMovie project and re-encoded. I tried using an alternate DV stream at the last part of the project and re-encoded. The corruption did not go away. Frustrated, I tried watching the DVD image on VLC Player application. It played fine without any problems! So I decided to bite the bullet and burn the image onto a double-layer disc (they're still expensive, at $7 each, so you know why I hesitated). I played the DVD on Windows computers. It played fine, too. Apple DVD Player started looking guilty.

Trying to see if this was not an isolated incident, I decided to scour Apple Discussions and indeed there was at least one more reported case. The corruption occurs at 03:18:38 mark and since movies rarely are more than this long, this bug was not often observed. Well, I hope Apple can fix it in the next version. If you ever get to play a 4-hour DVD like me, use VLC Player instead.