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smileLP · Jan 17, 2006, 10:48 PM

i drag a gig's worth of AVI or MOV files onto a blank disc

or burn the files any of the other 4 or 5 ways the mac manual sez to do it

they COPY ok onto the disc, cuz i can open the disc while it's still on my desktop and play the diff movies (via QT)

but when i eject the disc it won't play in either of my 2 dvd players

even the mac's dvd player won't recognize it to play through that

i'm having some OTHER prob w/toast, so i can't do it that way for now

but there oughta be some way to burn these files onto a disc that can be read like a dvd should, rt?

opinions? helpful suggestions? thanks!

chabig · Jan 17, 2006, 10:55 PM

You can't just drag files onto a DVD disc. They have to be burned in the special format that DVD players recognize. Your two choices for doing this are Toast, or iDVD. Since you are having problems with Toast, try iDVD.

Chris

smileLP · Jan 17, 2006, 11:03 PM

chris, thanks for the info

so if i have 5 avi/mov's of half a gig each, i just drop them one at a time into separate 'drop zones'?

it seems to work for the 1st one, then when i try another (wheel keeps spinning) and i have to force quit

thanks again

smileLP · Jan 17, 2006, 11:07 PM

oh, also, is there a size limit to what idvd can handle? dropping the first avi thing in seems to fill up about a third of it, based on the "meter' at the bottom. the 2nd one i try to drop, which starts the wheel spinning til i hafta force quit, is a little smaller, so no way it's filling up all the avail. space

and besides, shouldn't idvd let you assemble up to 4.3 gig, at least? (what are all those 8 'drop zones' for??)

thanks

smileLP · Jan 17, 2006, 11:09 PM

oh, and when i try to just burn the 1 big avi it took in the 1st drop zone

i get this error msg: "there are no video tracks defined" or some such

Brian McHale · Jan 18, 2006, 10:10 AM

The drop zones are just for the menus themselves. You might be able to drag/drop your videos to a blank place on your menu to add it, but I've always imported my videos. You might want to try importing.

smileLP · Jan 18, 2006, 11:07 AM

ok, IMPORTING seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that it would work

BUT i got an error msg that the 600 MB movie i'm trying to throw in there "exceeds the limit", and i would have to choose some encoder (quality) setting less than [best]

is that true? that's pretty limiting... is 600 MB that much for what's supposes to be a good/advanced program (idvd)?

Brian McHale · Jan 18, 2006, 03:13 PM

iDVD will easily handle 600 MB files. Is it possible that you've exceeded the overall limit with other items, like dropping full video files in the drop zones? I've mainly used iMovie to create my files for iDVD and I've made DVDs from files that were 20 GB without any problem. Maybe there's something about the format?