All posts in Apple

Last night I installed the 341MB System Update 10.5.2 and then Leopard Graphics update (48MB).
The size of the update re-iterates my belief that Leopard release was rushed with Apple cutting corners wherever it could to get it by end of October. 10.5.1 fixed only the most glaring issues – this looks to be much closer to what final version was supposed to be.

The most important issue fixed (for me) is the severe graphics problems that plagued nVidia 8600-based MBPs (like mine 2.2GHz model). As soon as the update finished installing (graphics update has several restarts during installation) I ran iDVD.

Preview of the 7.0 theme (Revolution) based DVD interface, with videos in the background drop-zone, now works without problems and creating the DVD image also worked.
Now I can finally finish my wedding DVD. :)

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.

I have a feeling this post will cause me days of torment from Dejan ;), but what the hell – I always wrote the full truth, as I saw it.

As I promised in the previous post, I used first free weekend to use iMovie and iDVD and to create the DVD disk for my wedding. This went rather well, up to a terrible crush. I created the movies, picked photos and had a background music in the back of my head.

iDVD is really nice and creating a DVD with submenus and video or still thumbnails is really easy. However, as soon as I tried to enter preview, things went ballistic. Main menu usually opens, but clicking on any of the submenus caused iDVD preview to completely halts. And not only that, but it freezes entire OS. Strangely, the only thing still working is mouse cursor – everything else is unresponsive. The only way out of there is hard reset.
I also tried to skip preview and save the DVD to VIDEO_TS folder, that finished the same after a while.

Threads on MacRumors and Apple’s own discussion forums reveal dozens of people with the same problem. It seems that problem appears when iDVD tries to render the submenus, notably menu transitions. It does not happen with all themes and it seem to be dependent of the content you put in the DVD structure. I think that my experiment with saving to VIDEO_TS folder confirms this, but I can’t be sure as Mac froze when I was in Firefox sidenote: 3.0b1 works much faster than 2.0.0.9 – there is hope.

People that know more than me reported that bunch of graphic card-related errors show up in some log. It may be. It could also be that Leopard + iLife is not-yet-fully-charted territory, even for Apple engineers. Betalogue blog is a great example for that, as this post proves it.

Apple seem to have changed a good deal of subsystems in Leopard, and some are just not polished as they should be. Which is not that unexpected, when the GM build is concluded just one week before the launch date. Somehow reminds of some other software company that I know…

At this moment, “I’m a PC” guy could easily dance around “I’m a Mac guy” and punch him just for fun.