Alternative to iDVD or different iDVD themes

[mcmlxix]

I couldn't find what I was looking for in MRoogle.

The thing I hate about iDVD (besides it taking so long to burn video DVDs on Mac) is that the themes are more than I need and take up valuable disc space.

1. Are there any iDVD themes that are simply a menu...no music, no video clip previews, no sappy backgrounds, etc?

2. Is there a free (or cheap) alternative to iDVD excluding Toast?

3. I'd be using .mov or .mp4 as my source video.

4. I have iDVD 7.0.4 and am using Snow Leopard. I really don't want to pay for iLife 11 as I never use Garage Band or iPhoto. iMovie kinda sucks too.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dave Braine]

Have a look at Burn:
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

 

[mcmlxix]

@Dave Braine

Thanks for the recommendation of Burn.

However, when I add a video track (mov or mp4) I get an error: "One incompatible file. Would you like to convert that file to mpg?" Then when I click "Convert", the application crashes to the desktop.

I'll fiddle around with the preferences to see if that resolves it.

So then I found and tried DVD Flick. It's for Windows, so luckily I have VMware Fusion.

Unluckily it didn't work. I got no pop up error, but after assembling the video I wanted to burn, it went through all of the motions and resulted in nothing.

I'm guessing the Windows partition can't find the DVD burner. I'll keep looking around to see what I find, and post back with my results.

 

[Dave Braine]

I get an error: "One incompatible file.

Yes, I've had that. Can't remember if I had the crash though. I think I ended up converting the clip to Dv using MPEGStreamclip, and it worked.

 

[mcmlxix]

Here's What I've Learned So Far

I still haven't been able to get Burn or DVD Flick to work.

I have found out a way to strip all of that nonsense out of the iDVD theme. Check this link out called Create a completely blank iDVD theme. It also works with 6.0 & 7.0 themes, but since the end result is the same, it doesn't matter which theme you do this to. So I'll be using iDVD for now.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060221045930743

As a side note:

I use MPEG Streamclip to split video. It reads and converts to several formats.

I use VisualHub for video splicing, it also does batch conversions. It reads and converts to several formats. Unfortunately it is no longer supported or for sale. But it can still be found.

I tried Simple Video Splicer for splicing, but found that although easier to use than VisualHub, it produced junk. Video and audio was often out of sync, and video clips would duplicate in strange places. Supposedly there's a way to get Quicktime to splice video, but I couldn't get it to work.

It would be sweet for the code for MPEG Streamclip and VisualHub to get together to create an all in one application. Open source? I wish I were more technical, and I'd put my actions where my mouth is to see if it's legally/financially possible.

 

[mcmlxix]

Another Side Note

Some might ask, why create the all in one app described above, when iMovie does all of that?

Because iMovie has too many problems. The GUI and transitions are great (yea Apple), but it supports too few video formats and I've found the output to be of lower quality. To add insult, it takes so long, a lot of time is wasted to discover the lower quality output (boo Apple).