What Happened to iDVD? (Or How Dawn Admits She's Wrong)

ByMike Moffit

Two customers walked in to our store (no, this isn’t the start of a joke) and asked how to burn a video from iMovie onto a DVD. The “Miss Smartypants” that I am said, “that’s easy, just go to the Share menu and choose iDVD!” An even smarter person chimed in with, “but iDVD doesn’t come with iLife ’11.” I retorted in a somewhat smart-a$$ way, “well it will be in the Share menu, so just have them choose the menu that has DVD in it.”

A day later, when I actually had time to look more deeply, I searched for iLife ’11 burn to DVD. And found Apple’s support page that instructed the user to select Share > iDVD. So I was right! (or so I thought). iDVD is definitely not included with iLife ’11 so I needed to dig even more.

I went down to the store to look at one of the 10.7 Lion demo computers that had iLife ’11 installed (therefore iDVD wasn’t already on the computer), and opened an iMovie project. I went to Share > iDVD which was one of my menu choices and wouldn’t you know, I got an error window—“Unable to find iDVD.” Miss Smartypants was completely wrong (and so was Apple, I might add, so I’m in good company).

So what do you do if you have iLife ’11 and want to burn a DVD? If you upgraded to iLife, you may still have a copy of iDVD and will be a-OK. There are other options if you don’t have iDVD.

The first is Sonic Solutions Roxio Toast v.11.0 which is a incredible piece of software that will solve just about any media burning issue you might have. (I’ve put Toast on special below!) A second option would be DVD Creator which is similar to iDVD and available on the App Store here. The third option is to use an open source solution like Burn.

I admit it, I was wrong.

So two customers walk in to our store…I forget the rest.

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