i have ALWAYS found iDVD burning to be terrible. it both takes a long time, plus it down converts the MPEG-2, so the quality is worse imho.
run it through dvd studio pro if possible.
ANY DVD creation software down converts to MPEG-2... And since he's in a hurry, running out and buying a $1300 encoding package to burn a DVD for mom seems a little excessive.
Also, ANY DVD creation software has to convert to MPEG-2, which takes a while. On even a 4X DVD drive, the encoding almost always takes longer than the burning. On a 4X DVD drive, the burning of a 100% full disc would take about 15 minutes. That's not an issue at all. (On a 16X drive, it's about 4 minutes, and on an 8X dual-layer drive, it's about 15 minutes as well.)
You have two options when burning a DVD in iDVD, 'Performance' mode and 'Quality' mode. Performance mode does two things: It enables 'background encoding', which means that even while you are messing around in iDVD, it will start encoding the videos; and it uses faster encoding. Quality mode gets its quality (and the ability to fit more on a single DVD,) by going through and encoding the contents once, figuring out where the video could be encoded better, and then goes through and encodes it again. (It's not re-encoding the already encoded material, it's more like the first run was a 'rough draft' run, and the second one is the 'for-real' encode.) On a completely full dual-layer disc, in Quality mode, it runs about 8 hours on a 2.0 GHz Core Duo, from hitting 'Burn' to ejecting the disc. (This is on an 8X dual-layer burner. A 2.4X burner would add a whopping 45 minutes.) For such a small disc as yours (10 minutes video, a couple dozen pictures,) you're looking at maybe an hour. If you use a non-animated menu, and use Performance mode, it might even be faster.
For example, I just created a DVD with 10 minutes of video, and a single 50 picture slideshow. It took about 20 minutes for the video to encode
in the background while I was doing edits to the DVD menu structure. (I made a point of waiting until the encoding was done to hit 'burn', just to see how quick it could be. You can monitor the encoding process by going to 'Project Info' from the Project menu.) This is with the 'Old Theme' of "Lightbox", with two photos in the drop zones, (so it wouldn't animate the menu,) and no background music. This makes for very little, other than the slideshow, for it to encode when I hit the 'Burn' button. From the time I hit the Burn button, to the 4X DVD-RW ejecting, it took about 10 minutes. Total 30 minutes, if you include the encoding time that had been 'in the background'.