iDVD Wonkiness

About every four months, I take the most recent crop of family videos and burn them to a DVD along with a slideshow of some of the better snapshots. This way the kids can always go back and watch themselves on TV , which they love, and I have a way to torture and chase away unwanted house guests. "Have you seen our latest DVD?!"

Anyway, the time came and I assembled all the various files and fired up the new iDVD. I got the little bouncy icon and got the start up window. I clicked "New Project" and iDVD thought about it for a bit and then just winked out of existence. Huh? Okay lets try that again. I fire up iDVD, click new project, and again the icon poofs on me. This is getting ugly. I'm having flashbacks to my days behind a windows machine when this type of glitchiness was the norm.

So I reverted to many years of drilled in windows training. I rebooted. Following the reboot I got the same problem. So I shut it down and then started it again. That is right, the Old Schooler's "cold boot." Again it failed.

At this point I was getting pretty frustrated and just a bit concerned that my machine may be having issues so I did a google search that came up empty and sent an email to one of my favorite Apple Genius pals. Then I went and worked in the yard. Nothing like pulling a few weeds to get things in perspective. I came back that evening to find an email from my Apple friend explaining there was a bug with iDVD and pointing me to a full explanation on the Apple boards. Sure enough, iDVD 08 does not play well with some of the old iDVD themes. I removed the offending themes and things worked great. Several of the new themes are, by the way, outstanding.

All is well that ends well but I must admit I'm disheartened that Apple would ship software that is not compatible with its own files. I mean it wasn't some third party application that caused this but Apple's own prior themes for the exact same program. Ummm ... who, exactly, was testing this?

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