For the love of god help me

[realisticphish]

ok, i've had it up to HERE with apple's dvd burning. I have a simple desire: i have an episode of mystery science theater. it is around 700 megs. I wish to burn this onto a DVD. WHY IS THIS SO HARD. My friends with windows computers that have inferior burners, and HALF the processor speed, can whip off a copy of a movie in about an hour or two. just to convert mine to some file format that MIGHT work takes freakin 8 hours. then, half the time, it doesn't even burn the damn disc right.

Could someone PLEASE give me a simple explanation on the easiest way to put an .avi onto a playable dvd?

Thanks

[politicat]

1. A bit more data would help....

What OS?
What Model?
How much RAM?
What processor speed?

Do you have iDVD (it's part of the OSX suite, so you should)?
Can you burn CDs with no problem?
Do you have a superdrive or separate drives for DVD and CD?

What file format is the file currently in?

Answer me these and I can probably help.

[realisticphish]

2. ok

OS 10.4.2
2 GHz G5 iMac
1 GB RAM
Superdrive
iDVD 5

the file is an .avi with a MP42 video codec and a mpga audio codec (those according to VLC)

iDVD burned the file, but it simply went black, with no sound, in every dvd player i tried it in. The menus showed up, etc, but when played, the file just went black.

[politicat]

3. When you burned the disk, were you doing anything else at all?

What I'm hearing is that the file was corrupted in burn, probably because other processes took priority from the burn.

DVD writing is very processor intensive, and even with a solid processor and a reasonable amount of RAM, you could still be interfering. So make sure everything is turned off - aggregators, news feeds, even the airport/network. Don't do anything - not even solitare or bejeweled. Walk away from the machine and I dunno... do the dishes or something.

In Prefs, under Energy Saver, set settings for Power adapter and optimization for better performance. Set sleep to never, set display to sleep to never, uncheck spin down hard drive.

Use only DVD-R disks, not DVD+R disks. Yes, I know G5s are supposed to be able to handle +Rs... but -Rs are more reliable in a Mac. Lots of people swear by Verbatim disks; I use Fuji or memorex myself, but MacDev and MacSlash both have a lot of positive feedback on Verbatim. Try another batch of DVDs - bad media matters far more with DVDs than it does with just about anything else.

Clear your cache. If possible, do nothing else before burning. (i.e. Restart and do the burn first.) Onyx is freeware and is a good cache cleaner.

When you insert the -R disk and it asks you what speed to burn the disk, set burn speed to lowest possible burn speed.

Instead of using iDVD, since you have the file in .avi format, you could try a simple drag and drop onto the burn file disk, then burning it that way.

Hope this helps.

[realisticphish]

4. my network pings a lot

so that might be the problem. now, as to drag onto the burn file disk, do you mean basically just do it like a data cdr?

I'm using maxell -R's, which seem fine, cause my friends have used them on their burners. but i'll give it a try, thanks

[politicat]

5. Turn off the network.

Yes, try a data DVR (or CDR; it's 700 mb, it will fit on a CD) and see what it does.

Maxell may work great on a PC, they may work great with someone else's burner... the next box in the production line may work fine, but DVR's are delicate little beasts and picky. It's kind of voodoo-ish because it is such a complex process.

MacDev and MacSlash both have a lot of articles on DVR and making the mac work.