iDVD stops responding

My brother just shot a film and put it on a dvd, and he wanted me to rip it, and make it pretty using my mac.

I ripped his movie using handbrake with the presets for quicktime. This produced a 1.5GB .mp4 file that QuickTime can play. I tried importing it into iMovie to try and split it up into a few chapters, but iMovie froze. I then figured that the chapters weren't needed, so I threw it straight into iDVD. iDVD then told me that it was too long. I went to the project info and saw that the project was 5.6GB! I set it to best quality instead of better performance and that fixed that (brought it back down to about 3GB). I put a simple menu (to test) in the project and saved it. I then tried to burn it to a dvd, and iDVD takes quite a while to process the menus and things, then it gets to the actual video that I put in there. This is where it freezes. What can I do to get this going?

Edit: I tried installing 10.4 (using the OEM install disk that came with my computer) onto a removeable drive. I got that done, but when I drag the file in question to a frame thing in iDVD, i get really small text that says i need to get some kind of codec i think. I updated QT and iDVD through software update and it didn't help the problem. QuickTime can now play the file, but when in iDVD the frame view still shows that text instead of the stilshot of the video. So when I get home, I'm going to update everything that software update can update. Maybe there is just a small bug with slightly older versions of the iLife package working in 10.5

You stated that iDVD freezes, are you sure it is frozen? Depending on your system it can take many hours to encode the DVD.

rman said:

You stated that iDVD freezes, are you sure it is frozen? Depending on your system it can take many hours to encode the DVD.

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I'm sure it stops responding... freezes may not be the word for it. I started the "burn" process (which includes the encode) and 5 minutes later i get some of the percentage bar filled in. An hour after that, it hasnt moved. I click and hold on the icon in the dock, and it gives me an option to force quit b/c the app isn't responding.

Is there any other way to get this mp4 file into a watchable dvd?

Please note that I am not asking for help on copying a commercial dvd. My brother and I are trying out this whole "film making thing" lol.

It could be that the codec in question is incompatible with Leopard? Which codec does it ask you for anyway?

MacHeadCase said:

It could be that the codec in question is incompatible with Leopard? Which codec does it ask you for anyway?

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Well, I know that it isn't the codec problem in leaopard... because it gives me that text in iDVD while booted from my 10.4 removeable drive. I'm not sure what codec it asks for ATM, but I can check. But, i still wonder wy it needs a codec to play an mp4 file... i thought that was pretty native to OS X

Note that while booted from 10.4, QT will play the file perfectly. in Frame view in iDVD, you can barely read the text where it is supposed to be a clip of the movie...

While in 10.5, QT will play it, and iDVD will show that clip in the frame, but has trouble encoding the mp4 file i suppose.

I have seen that when I use to work with iDVD. Just let it continue to process, it will start again after a period of time. On my old G5 system the encoding process could take up to three hours.

rman said:

I have seen that when I use to work with iDVD. Just let it continue to process, it will start again after a period of time. On my old G5 system the encoding process could take up to three hours.

Click to expand...

I guess I'll start it tonight, and let it go all night to see where it is after that. Thanks for your help. Also, one more quickie... why did a 1.5GB mp4 and a simple non-moving menu turn into over 5GB?

So, I started it @ 9:00 last night. I woke up this morning to find that it was barely halfway done processing. This is good, and bad news. It's good in the sense that the program isn't freezing up, and bad becuase of the time it's consuming; I don't know why it's taking this long. I still don't understand why the file comes out to be so large either. Any info?