phik

Dear Apple,

I rue the day that I wasted trying to use your stupid iDVD software. I also rue when I tried to use iMovie to work around the defects. I would have rued using Quicktime Pro, except by that point I had wised up, and I wasn’t about to give you fuckers any more of my money. Even deleting the whole project was a hassle, although I don’t know that I rued it per se.

I hate you guys,

Phil

Do not buy this product

My use case is very simple:

1. Import an AVI into iDVD
2. Add chapter breaks where the commercials used to be
3. Repeat until the DVD is full

This should be Use Case #1 at the Apple iDVD team design meetings, right? Vlad and Beltzner pointed out that no, in fact, Use Cases #1 through 14 all had to do with importing home videos of your baby, wedding, family vacation, or photo album. And it turns out that iDVD can’t do this simplest and most obvious of tasks. The only option for adding chapter breaks is an option to “Create Chapter Markers Every n Minutes”.

I posit that this is never what you want. Even if your movie is Little Franklin Goes to the Bathroom, what are the odds that he does something interesting every 8 minutes? Even I can’t operate my colon with that kind of precision.

Not content to have wasted only fifteen minutes, I browsed the help files, convinced that there must be a way. I mean, what kind of idiot company ships DVD software that can’t add chapters? Come on!

iMovie seems promising, but since the input file is xvid-encoded, iMovie needs to fold proteins for half an hour before you’re allowed to do anything. That’s fine, I can amuse myself exploring alternatives for that long. I wasn’t wild about waiting 35 minutes per file anyways.

While that went on, Google helped me find Metadata Hootenanny; I am physically incapable of passing on software with such an awesome name, and even better, its job is to manipulate Quicktime metadata including chapter markers! A solution is right around the corner.

Alas, there is no Intel build of the Hootenanny. Rosetta gets me going easily enough, except that it can’t load the xvid Quicktime plugin (I have both Intel and PPC xvid plugins installed, but I guess I don’t know where to put the PPC plugins, because they never work). [Editor's note: The innerweb implies that this is indeed possible, so if you know how, I'd appreciate a pointer.]

But that’s OK, Hootenanny will let me plug the chapter markers in, even if it doesn’t entirely understand the encoded content. When I write the file out, however, the video survives and the audio does not. This is a particularly interesting failure mode, because it doesn’t even need a plugin for the audio — it’s just mp3. In any case, that’s out.

Next, it occurred to me that iDVD project files are just plists, which are simple binary XML. The chapter offsets are right there, easily modified — admittedly annoying, but now success is within view.

No. It turns out that those offsets are exclusively for the menu items — so when you click the chapter you want, it starts at the right part in the stream. But chapter navigation with the forward/back buttons are governed by the “iDVD Generated Chapter Duration” key, or the chapter data in the imported video clip, but not the project XML. Fuck.

iMovie finished its Mersenne search a litle while ago, so I’ll go ahead and add chapters with this. All signs indicate that, time consuming thought it may be, iMovie can really add chapter markers. The interface is not totally intuitive, but as soon as I figure it out, it only takes a minute to add the four chapter markers. Now, to get it into iDVD.

Exporting is a non-starter. I’m not waiting another 35 minutes for it to re-compress. Seriously, who designs this crap?

There is a “Share -> iDVD” menu option that holds considerable promise, and it does exactly what it says. It takes just a few seconds for iDVD to receive the file, with the proper chapter markers, and forward/back working properly. Success!

There’s just one catch: sharing between applications in this way causes iDVD to open a new Project, and it can only have one Project open at a time. So you can’t have more than one of these multi-chapter streams in your DVD, which makes it almost completely worthless.

Do not buy this product either

Fortunately, Apple bundles iDVD and iMovie together, so you can conveniently avoid buying just a single package.

It does appear that Quicktime Pro can do what I want — take an xvid AVI, add a chapter track, and write it as a MOV in just a few minutes. They definitely don’t want you to forget that it’s Apple software, which despite all of the hype, has some of the worst user interface Chernobyls ever to punish mankind. Adding chapters with Quicktime Pro is — I swear to god I am not making this up — a thirteen step process that begins with opening a text editor. But I’ll be god damned if I’m paying for it until I see that tortured process yield a proper DVD with my very own eyes.

I think I just rued again.