Idvd08 freezes when rendering chapters

Question

I have a brand new MacBook Pro with Leopard installed and IDVD 08. I have made a long movie in IMovie which has a number of chapters. I created the DVD in iDVD 08 a few weeks before Chrstmas, but when I went to burn the DVD, it kept freezing after a while whilst rendering chapter menus.
I understand this is a known issue between iDVD08 and the Leopard operating system. Does anyone know if this issue has now been resolved or, if not, what is the ETA for a fix?
Many thanks
Joe McCrea

Answer 1

Hello All,
I've been struggling all week-end on a project my son called me in for rescue. I've experienced too that total freeze of my brand new MBP (15"). To make things short: The problem is not solved yet, but I've isolated several facts.
First, it's started with a problem my son had with his school project on a PB-G4 and iDVD fron 08'. It choked because we had imported some 30fps elements into a 25fps project. It choked on muxing those heterogenous elements, even tough "properly" imported by iDVD.
Second. I copied his project to my MBP to benefit from the processing speed increase. On that same project, I didn't reached the point to generating the movie and got the freeze when creating the assets.
I spare you all the events in between. But after clearing that 30fps vs 25fps conflict by regenerating all components in 25fps natively, I identified the exact moment of the crash.
That project uses the Revolution theme from Theme 7.0. I've successfully generated an image file using another Theme like the Concrete Theme from www.dvdthemepak.com
The freeze appears when iDVD comes on generating the first "Scene selection" menu screen from the project. It's kind of odd as this project has 8 chapters requiring an additional scene selection menu. I see the 2nd scene selection menu being processed Ok, and the Top menu too. All menus use the same additional content for the one drop zone the Revolution theme has.
That "freezing" is very odd to me. I'm a unix geek. A system never freezes under Unix. At most, one process can go wild and hog all CPU and never relinquish a cycle before being terminated by kernel. In the case of MacOSX, the freeze is only apparent: the window manager process gets hosed. It's very probable that you can ssh to it from another unix system and shut it down being root. In this freeze. The dual cores of the Intel chips gives more chances accessing the shell level before the machine is brought to a stand still. Here: no CPU overheating. Just a plain solid freeze. I've not tracked any kernel event letting me know of a kernel issue. This is plain odd to me. I'm learning new stuff here.
Back to the issue. I was even fearing at one moment it was disliking the accentuated characters we've used in the menu texts. I eliminated this option too be removing all accents from the vowels.
Needless to say that this Project compiled without a glitch on the PowerBook. At least, we were able to finish that assignment.
Now, my MBP is still not fixed. Gotta call AppleCare for that.
Some additional clues: I got this MBP with iLife loaded in. It was missing the Old Themes I like, plus www.dvdthemepak.com themes. iDVD is smart and proposes you to load those Old Themes from the MacOSX Install disk 2 .... but this fails !!!! As I'm a bit smart I gave a try popping in the iLife 08' DVD and it allowed me to install the missing Old Themes. Now something went wrong because iDVD 7 doesn't behave like iDVD 6 and splits the lastest Themes away from the oldest and custom Themes by copying them to the user's Library folder. It keeps under the /Library only the latests themes.
I manually copied from another Mac the www.dvdthemepak.com themes and this was my mistake. iDVD went totally haywire not even recognising its installed themes, displaying a "Broken Theme" image in a hugly kiddy art crayon chalked letters. Anyways: stand still.
I decided to trash both Themes directory (user and system), pop-in the iLife DVD and reinstall iDVD. I was NOT given the choice to re-install iDVD ! So, I trashed iDVD app and tried again installing iDVD through the iLife DVD. Well, not much luck: The installer doesn't let me install iDVD but only the additional old themes. I went on with this option. "Miracle!" iDVD app was installed, with the additional themes ... but NOT the main themes (5, 6 and 7) Arrrrgh ! I'm choking.
So, I copied from another Mac with iLife 08' the 5, 6 and 7 Theme. And it worked.
Well, not that god as now iDVD freezes with the Revolution 7 theme. It may not be at all linked to all the problems I got updating iDVD from the default instal of a new MBP. At least, by reading this, you people are aware that you can only get the Old Themes from an Web install, or the iLife DVD. But NOT from the supplied DVDs.
I would need to try compiling this project with another Theme from the Theme gallery. That would identify that Themes 7 as being part of the problem (as www.dvdthemepak.com are operational).
Also, I'm eager to learn of a SAFE procedure to reinstall iDVD.
Last: I've not been able to do a "repair permissions" yet on this machine as I don't have a Leopard DVD. The Install disks that come with the MBP are not bootable. There is a different procedure that requires a specific set of actions in "to reinstall Leopard" in order to boot on those DVD. I'm scared this new procedure really reinstall Leopard, which will be a catastrophe of biblical proportions to me!
Very last. I still need to dig in the archived system logs to see if iDVD reported something before the freeze.
Hoping this help. I promise I'll post updates here when available.