Mac-(di)ed
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.