Best settings to use when preparing HD source material for iDVD?

I realize iDVD is effectively abandonware, and that it was never really designed either to run on Lion nor to import high definition content...but nevertheless here I am (somewhat unavoidably) trying to do both and constantly getting the dreaded and mysterious "an error occured during movie encoding" result when I try to burn or export my project to a disc image.
If it matters, I am using a Mac Pro (1,1) with a 5770, running 10.7.5 with 8GB of RAM and oodles of free diskspace. All of my software is fully up to date, including iDVD 7.1.2 build 1158. Several utilities report nothing erroneous with my drives or their filesystems. I have made sure Perian is not installed. I have tried to create and export this DVD using both my primary user account and a clean dummy one I made for testing purposes.
After considerable trial and error experiments, each taking several hours to attempt, I've decided that I'm never going to easily figure out exacty which of my many various source files for this project (holiday videos for family) may be giving iDVD hiccups. Instead, I've decided to take another approach, making all of my content as easy to "spoon feed" to iDVD as possible. Hopefully then I can get this project done.
My question is what, ideally, does iDVD like to be fed?
For starters, I am in the process of transcoding and repackaging all of my content through MPEG Streamclip to be AIC video and uncompressed audio inside MOV containers. In each case I am scaling the video down to be 480 lines tall. Just guessing, but that seems like it would give iDVD the least possible work to "think" about and get confused. Does that sound about right to folks?
Should I be doing something drastic and old school like trying to create DV files? My content is all wide aspect, intended for a 16:9 iDVD project and that seems like it would get tricky (also, this would involve more quality loss than using AIC files).
I am totally open to suggestions here. Just please don't say "dude, use Toast" or something because while I have plenty of other tools that I know would work more easily and reliably, I really want to mimic the holiday discs from previous years that I've created using the same iDVD theme.

I haven't had to wrestle with this problem, but I've followed some of the discussions and here are several ideas and resources which seem reasonable.  As background, have you read about better results from using iMovie6?  Also, as you imply, DV Stream (.dv) was the native format for iDVD.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16296991#16296991
http://blog.progravix.com/?p=456
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5432
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1611?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
...and don't forget David Pogue's "Missing Manual" series for iMovie and iDVD are excellent resources.
John

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