iDVD

Rarely does Apple really annoy me, but iDVD is one instance. I’ve been putting together a slideshow for my parents to play at our second wedding reception in Minnesota in a couple weeks. Between iPhoto and iDVD, this is a very easy task on a Mac, unless you’re trying to use an external DVD writer.

I’d been playing around in iDVD with several slideshows of the wedding imported from iPhoto, and had the DVD exactly how I wanted it. I inserted a blank DVD into my external Lacie drive (which I’ve been very happy with, by the way), and tried to click on the “burn” icon in iDVD. … Nothing … Hmmm … maybe I needed to click burn before inserting the disk. … Nope … that didn’t work either.

I googled “iDVD Lacie” and found several discussions, the upshot of which was that iDVD doesn’t work with external drives (Apple itself does not produce any external DVD drives), and that it’s Apple’s fault, not the external drive. That’s a pisser.

I whined to Andrew, who found a hack within a few minutes. There were several reports of problems with the hack, but more reports of the hack working well, so I decided to try it. Fortunately it worked, and I haven’t found any ill side-effects just yet. I’m still miffed at Apple. Come on people, some of us don’t realize that we need a DVD writer until after we’ve been using our new systems for a while — it’s just natural to get an external drive at that point. Do you really want to alienate us??

One other irritation with iDVD — each slideshow is limited to 100 photos. I had a great wedding ceremony and reception one put together, and it truncated it just after we arrived at the reception. I had to break it up into three different slideshows, plus, since there is a 6 slideshow limit, I had to eliminate the slideshows from our honeymoon and of the girls and I getting ready on the wedding day. Oh well…at least I have my DVD ready for my parents.