A fine switch this is…First a fuck-up with the ExpressCard driver, then the intolerable mess of loose threads that iDVD ’08 is. This is the single most frustrating part of my Mac experience so far.
iDVD does not work. The only way for my MacBook Pro to survive through DVD burning (particularly menu rendering) is to not use background photos or videos on anything but Main menu. At least main menu rendering never failed. So far. It does not matter do you use 6.0 or 7.0 themes, if you max them out with videos and slideshows all over drop zones, this piece of unstable crap will halt entire Mac OS X.
During that, system.log is filled with repeated messages like this:
Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout! Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b
Every 10 seconds. And this on 10.5.1 and iLife 08 with all the updates. The fact that final version of Leopard with one system update already out is still having driver issues is utterly unacceptable.
Just works, my ass.
It seems that fine craftsmanship of writing proper drivers or firmwares for otherwise great hardware is inevitably lost in the space of high profit margins and “time to market”.
Shame.
oh, this is so funny, reading your first impressions where you drool after seeing Jobs’s iDvd marketing, and then the last two which gradually lead to “just works my ass”, oh, fantastic!
Apple has such a disgusting marketing machine, how on earth are they capable of creating such a myth when they are unable to make the drivers work on a closed machine with predefined and well known and always the same set of components :). On the other hand windows developer teams have to write drivers for 47326576435826094 components and some of them even work impeccably.
I’ve exactly the same problem!!! I’ve writed a bug report to Apple over ADC. There are several discusions about this in different forums. Search the web with “graphics channel exception”…
Hope there will be a fix soon! The bug must be made more public, so that Apple MUST FIX THIS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!
10.5.2 + Leopard graphics drivers updates have resolved this problem. (Feb 12th)