HT1583 Creating a DVD of photos, what do the settings have to be in order to accomplish good resolution on a widescreen tv?

Question

I'm trying to burn a DVD of photos with music and the quality of the photos is not the same as the original photos I'm working with after I view the burned DVD.  What settings are needed to insure a good quality of the photos?

Answer 1

There's no way you'll see the same image quality on a video DVD with still photos as you will when displaying the original image file on your high resolution monitor.  iDVD encodes all media to the video DVD standard of 640 x 480 pixels.
First crop the photos to the DVD aspect ratio of 4:3. 
Are you creating a slideshow with music and using that in iDVD or creating the slideshow in iDVD itself by adding still photos and music from the Media Browser in iDVD?
Note:  if you're adding still photos to iDVD to create the slideshow remember that there is a 99 slide limitation.  If more than 99 slides  there will be a pause at the 99 to 100 slides transition.  It can be minimized (but not eliminated) by burning at the slowest speed possible and using top grade disks.
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 or Toast 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.
OT