Burning iDVD to DVD disc with i Book G4 combo drive and external DVD drive

Question

7/6/2006. After much recent experimentation with iLife, iMovie and iDVD, I found how to use themes and set up movies in my iBook G4 purchased two years ago near Chicago (updated to OS 10.3.9). To burn an iDVD file to a DVD disc on a "combo drive" (that is, it has no DVD writer drive) iBook or other comparable Mac, go to File on the top horizontal tool bar and down there to "burn to DiscImage." Depending on the size of the file, it will take about four hours for every hour of movie file to encode it. I just set it up that night, went to bed and woke up the next morning with it finished. Once encoded, it doesn't need to be encoded again and can be used in the future. But Toast 7 Titanium will not burn it to an external DVD writer as "video." but it will burn the video file as "data." And pretty fast. The 'data' file still remains a video file and will do everything the video file does, only now from an external round DVD disc, too. I discovered this by accident, although Matt (tech support) reminded me about DiscImage. Later, David (also in tech support) told me to download newer versions of iDVD and iMovie, but that did not work, nor had he ever tried it. Remember for a combo drive and using iDVD, and also iMovie, under File burn to DiscImage and save on an external disc as "data." My external DVD write is by LaCie. Best wishes. Chuck Yopst [email protected] Chicago area.
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Like altero said, you're not using Toast properly... Follow these directions:
Suggest you create a disc image from iDVD and then burn the DVD. In iDVD: File/Save as Disc Image...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=164927
This will isolate any encoding/burning issues you may encounter. Once the disc image is created, double-click the .img and burn the virtual disc that should appear on your desktop, using Toast to burn the DVD. Disk Utility to burn the .img file. Usually, you can select a burning speed in Disk Utility.
There are variations to this process based on which OS X you are using...
Open Disk Utility (in Utilities folder in Applications folder), click on the virtual disc (maybe the .img) in the left-hand window. Click the Burn icon. A new window should drop down and your SuperDrive tray will open after clicking the Burn icon. Insert a recordable DVD. (Verbatim DVD-R preferred by me.) Click the Close button. Wait. Select a burn speed. If you hold your mouse cursor over the pop-up it says: "Select a slower speed to work around burn failures," so select 4x or slower for best results. Then click the Burn button.
-->If the virtual disk selection won't allow you to click the Burn icon, use the .img file instead. This may have changed in 10.3.9 and did change in Tiger.
Also, you can use DVD Player to play the virtual disk to check your iDVD project before burning to DVD. Launch DVD Player. File/Open VIDEO_TS (Open DVD Media... in Player 4.6). Find the VIDEO_TS folder and open that. (The audio folder is for DVD-Audio disks.)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93006