How to boot to yosemite

I always update my system and apps, but the latest update to El Capitan has not been smooth for me-but I do like what does works for me. I have spent the past 2 days trying to burn a movie to a DVD using iDVD. I've spent hours scouring the Apple Support pages and find that I am not alone. Even the 'top' guy in the support arena states the it looks like iDVD is just fading away as El Capitan just does not support it. Problem is, I like that program A LOT! I tried every suggestion posted except one--reverting to Yosemite. Along that line, it was suggested I create a bootable USB stick, which I had before I created a newer updated one for El Capitan. So, who can help me with suggestions and hints on how to do this? If I boot from a USB, do I have access to iDVD? What would happen to those saved video files from iMovie? Would being able to choose a different OS to boot into mean DDD partitioning? Thanks for your help.

If you boot to the USB stick what you'll have is an installer, for Yosemite. You cant run apps from it.
To revert to it you'll have to reformat the drive or it wont install. Which means you need a good backup.
To save yourself time and work you might want to look into Roxio Toast.

crampon,
afraid that your comments were going to be the rule. Thought I'd ask in case there was a temp fix for me just when I wanted to run iDVD. Looks like Toast will be the option, but a fellow I know who has it doesn't like it too much.

Hmmm....
So now I'm a traction device for ice: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=crampon


Toast works great, I use it fairly regularly to burn. Some people don't like it. Give it a try before you buy it.

I haven't gone through the entire process, but iDVD appears to work just fine for me here in El Cap.

Where SPECIFICALLY are you running into trouble with iDVD?

It's obviously best if folks like chas_m can sort out your problem within OS X; but if you need to consider Roxio Toast, I can tell you that I have bought & run the app from 2011 to the latest Toast 14 which came out in 2015. Used it a great deal. Genuinely, never had any problem. It is pricey.

Ian

chas_m
The first problem I noticed was when I tried to make a copy of a DVD i had made a number of years ago from old home movies. Nothing that was copyrighted. I used Disk Utility to make a disk image. Did both a reg. & cd/dvd master. After each of these, I inserted verbatim dvd-r disk and right click to burn. After many hours of wait time, the disk was ejected & window said it was done but the actual burning was incomplete. When put back into the burner, they dvd showed as being blank, but writing to it was not to be done. I tried to burn by simply dragging over the 2 folders inside the disk image. No good. I eventually made a copy using my old windows machine and Creator 2011. But I wanted a mp4 too. I discovered that some time ago I must have made a m4v copy and then I used quicklime to make a mov from that and then used iMovie to create an mp4. I then tried idvd to create a dvd. My first attempt took 14+ hours to work but the next morning I see the disk ejected but unburned. I began to explore in apple communities and followed dirs to delete idvd plist pref & idvd cache. I made sure no old projects were in my documents.movies folders. I shut down Time Machine after a computer restart as well as any other app running. Because the mp4 I was trying to burn was in excess of 6 Gb, I used idvd to adjust the quality to lower the size of the file. This time the burning process took a more reasonable 1+ hour, but I still had the disk ejected before the burn was complete. My last attempt was successful in that I used Handbrake to work on the original mp4 I had made which reduced the size to 3+ Gb and the burn completed. The whole process took way too long as something is not working correctly. I recently did a clean install of El Capitan. It just doesn't work the way it did for me when I was using Yosemite.

Just thought I'd mention I haven't used my very old version of Toast for ages as I found the open source Burn worked better, but only last used with Mavericks, so I don't know about it with El Capitan:
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

But comments imply it still works well:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21992/burn

Burning DVDs requires a MASSIVE amount of free storage space (like 5x-10x the size of the video file or target media capacity). Do you have that much free space?

chas_m said:

Burning DVDs requires a MASSIVE amount of free storage space (like 5x-10x the size of the video file or target media capacity). Do you have that much free space?

Click to expand...

Yes, 550 gb

Well, as soon as I get a chance I will try creating a fake "DVD" of a short movie and see if I can reproduce the issue. It could well be that iDVD just doesn't work anymore fully under El Cap ... it was discontinued QUITE a while back.

I don't think I even have iDVD on my system anymore to test this. It has always been a little bit " twitchy" for me. I used to think it was because my machine was too slow but it's been true on every machine that I've had. Generally it screwed up just prior to beginning the burn.

Here's an interesting fix that might be related and might work in this thread:
Does anyone know if iDVD works with El Capitan?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7296372

I will certainly have to give this a try the next time need to burn a vid