External DVD burner, iDVD, .img file...

[Nomi]

I picked up an external DVD burner on a labor day sale for use with my MacBook (I don't know the brand now, left the box at home, it's just some generic one). Currently I'm helping out a family friend with a slideshow thing they had done at a funeral home, and now I'm adding audio tracks and doing some simple menu stuff so they can have more copies.

iDVD is apparently famous for not liking external DVD burners. This is the case with me. I plug the thing in and Finder acknowledges the blank, recordable disc and all that fun stuff, but iDVD won't have anything to do with it. I tried to Save As Disc Image so I could just burn that with the utility, but it only gives you the option to make a .img and I have no idea what to do with those.

If anyone has tips for either making iDVD recognize the burner or get it to Windows or something I'd appreciate it much.

[Nomi]

Update: I'm still kind of stuck. Finally got the audio to go and I have a nice, happy .img disk image from iDVD. Now what? I'm sending that 3 gig bitch to my iMac right now, which has a very unreliable but ocassionally function Superdrive, so I'm going to try and import it into iDVD and do this shit like Apple wants me to. If that doesn't work, I think I need to figure out how to get an iMovie/iDVD project or the .img into something Windows can handle.

Any of you Mac guys know how the hell I can make this work? I absolutely need to get a DVD-player friendly DVD burned by the end of this weekend. Fuck iDVD for not liking external burners, imo.

[andyrose]

.img is just a standard CD or DVD image file, or an exact virtual digital copy of a disc, it just hasn't been burned yet. You should be able to burn that with most CD/DVD burning programs. I mostly use Nero on Windows XP, I'm not sure what you would use with a Mac. But it's really as simple as finding a CD/DVD burning program that will burn disc images, and going into the options to 'burn an image to disc'.

[mollipen]

First, the current version of iDVD should work fine with external DVD burners. So your best bet is to upgrade, either properly or not so properly.

Beyond that, I haven't worked a lot with buring disk images to video DVDs. If you mount the disk image, and if iDVD formatted it properly, you should be able to use Disk Utility to burn it to a DVD and have it work properly. Should is the key word there, however.

No matter what, though, if you're going to be doing DVD burning, especially with an external non-Apple drive, get yourself Toast Titanium. Almost everything you'll want to do burning wise can be done with Toast.

[Nomi]

The current version of iDVD doesn't think my external burner exists. Using Disk utility it burned fine with it.

I got it done by using my iffy iMac and Tain. Thanks anyway.

[mollipen]

The current version of iDVD doesn't think my external burner exists. Using Disk utility it burned fine with it.

Are you sure you have iDVD '06?

[Nomi]

I have whatever came with my MacBook in July and the automatic updates and it says version 6 under 'About iDVD'. So, yeah, I have the most recent version and it says that my external burner doesn't exist (even though it will mount the blank disc on my desktop and Disk Utility has no problem with it).