Interactive Llama

Over fifty-percent of the DVDs I burn in DVD Studio Pro 4 (DSP) fail and become coasters, and every fifth or sixth DVD I burn forces me to restart my Dual G5 Mac Pro! The problem is that I have to Force Quit DVD Studio Pro when it is burns or formats the DVD. I wait about five minutes after the status bar has stopped moving. I then force quit DVD Studio Pro with the DVD unable to eject without restarting OS-X. There are ways of ejecting the DVD through holes with paper clips, but I might as well restart my computer than do that. I hate it when Apple thinks they know best by not allowing for an eject button that is on the front of the computer and not software supported via the keyboard. I have the same drive (Pioneer DVR-109) on my PC at home, and do not have this many problems!

To burn video DVDs, I’ve switched to the open source burning software, Burn. I’m sure many other programs will work that support the video DVD file system.

Since I have switched, I have a 20% coaster rate, and this program verifies the data, too (which as far as I know DSP doesn’t do). Most importantly, I have not had to restart my computer yet! I must mention that I am burning at 4x. I going to guess that the DSP default (and only setting) is to burn at the maximum rate of the drive which is 8X.

As a side note, we buy hub-printable white Taiyo-Yuden 8x DVD-Rs from AllMediaOutlet for all our DVD burning. We also buy silver non-hub-printable Ritek CD-Rs for out CD burning. As far as I know, no one makes hub-printable silver CD-R or DVDs.

Are there better consumer DVD-Rs out there?

If you cannot create ANY buttons (yes, that’s correct, no buttons can be created), DVD Studio Pro halts at “Loading Menus” when opening any project files, not can apply templates (Status bar halts when apply any templates).

The problem is exactly like the following posts:
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=155&postid=559211&archive=T
http://www.wwug.com/cgi-bin/displaywwugpost.fcgi?forum=astarte_dvd&post=050427195617.htm

Guess what? All these problems are connected. It is a font conflict. I orginally removed all my fonts with FontBook that had a black dot to the right of it. It seemed to fix the problem–UNTIL I restarted OS-X. The problem was back again! I called Apple to see how to re-install the fonts. If this was Windows, I’d use the cab extractor (extract.exe) from the XP disk, but Apple doesn’t have a package viewer app. Their Tech Support told me to do an archival re-install of OS-X. (Thanks a lot, Apple!!!) Kind of over-kill for just a few fonts, don’t you think? So I re-installed my whole OS (well, the archival re-install) a few days ago. This meant re-downloading 150MB+ of updates I have previously downloaded via Software Update. (I’m sure they were probably in some temp folder, but being new to OS-X I wasn’t sure where.)

The Solution

What I really and only needed to do was re-active the Helvetica.dfont file from FontBook. It is not located in the normal font folder, but in the System/Library/Fonts folder. Now DVD Studio Pro 4 works fine. Yes, it even creates buttons and actually opens files now!

Lesson learned: Software should not be dependent on fonts–even if it is a system font.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com