I just tried burning a DVD in iDVD 4. The first one burned fine. The second project was approximately the same length and complexity in terms of number of chapters. It failed with a buffer underrun error (all of the audio is there but the video fails at about chapter 5). Same box of media, no other changes.

Suggestions?

What burner are you using? What speed media are you using? Which Mac are you using?

Sorry, late at night when I posted.

G5, dp 2 gig, 1 gig ram, superdrive, 10.3.x

2x Verbatim media

I'm going to try forcing the burner to burn at a lower speed to see if it will help.

Well, I can't seem to find a place to specify a lower burn speed. I looked in the preference panel for iDVD and for DVDs in the systems update. Anywhere else?

I would guess a media error or drive error. If you can force it to burn at a slower speed, that would help.

Here is the Console log for the error -

2004-07-03 16:02:28.320 CrashSubmitter[480] Crash report submitted!
iDVD: Burn started, Sat Jul 3 17:49:22 2004
iDVD: Burning to DVD-R media with DAO strategy in PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-106D A606 via ATAPI.
iDVD: Requested DVD burn speed was 47x, actual burn speed is 2x.
iDVD: Burn underrun protection is supported, and enabled.
iDVD: Burn failed, Sat Jul 3 19:06:42 2004
iDVD: Burn sense: 5/21/02 Illegal Request, Invalid address for write
iDVD: Burn error: 0x80020060 The device drained its buffer without burn underrun protection.
2004-07-03 19:11:00.055 SystemUIServer[379] CPSLaunchAppWithData (/Applications/DVD Player.app, ..)

I'm beginning to think maybe a bad drive. On the log it says buffer underrun protection is supported and enabled but when it fails it says the device drained its buffer without buffer underrun protection.

Have you tried apple/support/discussions/idvd? I think I've seen this buffer underrun issue come up there - on the g5s and idvd4, as in your case. Can't remember if Apple posted a knowledge base "fix" or not.

I did a search - the recommendations on the knowledge base are close to worthless. I've posted to the discussions forum with little luck so far.

This was a very simple project - 9 clips, no transisitions, no additional sound.

Have to wait til Tuesday to call Apple Care and see about getting a new drive. Sigh.

Ok, I just got a successful burn using best performance versus best quality. I'm still not happy with the two previous failures at best quality.

Well it wasn't a fix but I was able to burn successfully if I used best performance rather than best quality (these are on DVDs less than an hour).

Being a glutton for punishment I then merged two of the files and had a successful burn on best quality if the original footage was greater than 60 minutes.

It burned but the sync was dreadfully off! I may play around in QTPro to fix.

So, it doesn't appear to be the media or the drive. This suggests that there are problems with iDVD or with 10.3.4 (encoding seems to be fine, its the burning that wasn't working).

Can't wait to move to DSP this fall!

"Best quality/best performance" seems to be the sad refrain I remember from reading the Apple discussion threads. It's an iDVD4 problem, which is why I'm still using iDVD3.01. It's amazing that people who do marketing let that kind of apparent dichotomy even show up in a menu - bad advertising for a product. On the audio sync, one of the fixes (even worked for me the one time I had a problem in iDVD3) is to extract audio and make sure it's pasted at the playhead.(I only did it for the segment where the problem showed up - it can be a real mess if you extract all the audio and the separate segments start to move around.)