iDVD encoding

RRSounds at aol.com RRSounds at aol.com
Tue Jan 20 01:02:57 PST 2004


In a message dated Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:26:02, Steven Rogers <srogers1 at austin.rr.com> writes:


<<
On Monday, January 19, 2004, at 01:47 PM, RRSounds at aol.com wrote:

> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 12:28:21, Steven Rogers <srogers1 at austin.rr.com>
>
> <<
>> On 1/19/04 1:18 AM, "RRSounds at aol.com" <RRSounds at aol.com> wrote:>
>>>
>>> Your iMovie project is on the external drive, but it's my experience
>>> that iDVD wants to use your OS X boot drive to encode onto, before it
>>> burns the disc.
>
> What gives you that impression?  Those files are in the DVD project
> file .
>
> Steve,
> You know, what you say would make a lot of sense. But it doesn't
> reflect my experience.
>
> When I try to burn a DVD with iDVD, with the project definitely NOT on
> my boot disc, and dozens of free GB on the iDVD project drive, if my
> boot disc doesn't have enough free space I will definitely get a "not
> enough space on disc" error.
>
> I originally thought it was an error with a bad DVD blank, since it
> doesn't tell you *which* disc doesn't have enough space. So much for
> accuracy of error messages.
> :-P
>
> When I free up enough space on the boot drive, the disc burns fine.
> Maybe iDVD uses the boot drive for some kind of scratch disc. I don't
> know, all I can tell you is what I see.
>
> Like I said, this is my experience. It's happened to me on more than
> one occasion (since I'm stupid enough to keep loading extraneous stuff
> on my boot drive).
>
> If you haven't had this experience, I would have to suspect you
> probably have more than 4.5 to 4.7 GB free on your boot drive, and
> just haven't run up against it.

Well, I do have a lot of free space on my boot drive. The thing I'm
basing my comments on is looking in the project file and seeing the
files in there. (you can tell they're in there just by the size of the
file.)

It could be that iDVD checks the wrong drive for free space - or it
could be that it expects to use some temporary working space on the
boot volume, in addition to the space in the project file.

I haven't ever seen the space used go up on my boot volume, with 4-5
in-process projects on other disks. Are you seeing iDVD actually use
space on your boot volume when your project is somewhere else? That
would be pretty curious.

SR
>>


Steve,
I don't know about you, but when I'm encoding a DVD, I don't do ANYTHING else with my computer, including checking for free space. Call me superstitious, but as soon as I click that "Burn" button, it's hands-off until the disc pops out, be that 15 minutes or six hours later.

I would suspect that if iDVD is using the boot drive for a scratch disc, it will delete the file when the job is done, unless the disc-burning process fails or is aborted. Only then might we find a tell-tale file... though it's probably invisible. :-)

I am not in a position to offer a definite answer, just some clues that seem to have some relevance to Dorothy's problem.

*Peace*

David Reaves



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