DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Apple’s iLife ‘05 is a surprisingly good deal. The combination of iMovie and iDVD gives users the ability to create impressive, professional DVDs. Maternity wards should give one of these free to new parents, instead of that cheesy gift bag of disposable diapers.

There is one catch: iDVD doesn’t recognize 3rd-party DVD burners. It can only burn discs using an internal Apple “SuperDrive.” (SuperDrive is Apple’s marketing word for a combination CD writer and DVD writer.)

This is apparently an improvement over previous versions of iDVD, which wouldn’t even run if no SuperDrive was present. (!)

We have an external CD/DVD burner. It connects via FireWire. I’ve used it for four years to burn hundreds of CDs and a handful of DVDs, and it has worked on four different Macs.

But iDVD refuses to acknowledge its existence: the “Burn” menu item is grayed out.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: create a disk image and write it to the DVD using a third-party application:

1. In iDVD, select File->Save As Disk Image.
2. Use Toast (or any other DVD-burning application) to burn the resulting image to the DVD. Be sure the app recognizes that it’s burning a DVD, rather than a data disk with a DVD disk-image file on it.