Help / advice on iDVD / DVD production

Hi guys this may be a simple one for some of you. In previous years I have produced a DVD of the school show, edited it in iMovie and burnt off copies via iDVD. Since last year I have upgraded my iMac to Snow Leopard and this year I am having various problems with, principally, iDVD in that it seems to be finding all sorts of reasons to fail. Most notably it ejects the dvd then says its finishing ( 2 minutes to go),and an hour later it still has 2 minutes to go.
Versions are as follows:
OS X 10.6.8
iDVD 7.1.2
IS there an incompatibility issue I'm not aware of or am I better buying something like Toast instead? (If so, can I import the movie as I do in iMovie?).
Hope someone can help here.

Alan

I think the first thing you need to do is determine if your optical drive is working correctly. An optical drive with a marginal laser will cause that exact symptom you're experiencing to occur. Buy a can of compressed air from Radio Shack or other store which sells electronic accessories, and blow a couple of short blasts in the drive. The lens may be covered with dust.

An idea to try out the above theory, instead of burning, try saving the Project as a disk image via the File menu. If that's successful you can then burn that using Disk Image,

Burning A DVD

HI Guys I tried both the compressed air to clean teh drive and still had the problem. I then tried teh disc image solution and received this message:

The disc can’t be burned because because communication between the computer and the disc drive failed (error code 0x80020022).

Does this mean I have a drive failure??

Al

Update

Me again. Have done some digging on this and it appears to be a common fault. In most cases a new drive seems to solve it. However I have repaired disc permissions and am rerunning the job to see what transpires.

cheers

Al

A further update

Hi guys thanks for the suggestions, still no luck unfortunately.
I've run repair disc permissions, still no luck.
I've burned a CD from iTunes - OK
I've burned a DVD from iTunes using the same DVD's for the concert - OK

When i go back to the school show recreate the disc image, burn it to disk - same error.

I'm completely stumped.

Al

How much free space do you have on that drive?

Hi Chas, it's a 320gb drive with 120gb free

Al