What Do You Need to Make DVDs?

If your Mac has a SuperDrive (a drive that reads and writes DVDs), you can use the iDVD software to create and burn professional-looking DVDs that will play on almost any current DVD player or on any computer that can play DVDs.

Supported disc formats

You need blank discs on which to burn your project. iDVD prefers a type of "general media" disc called DVD-R (pronounced DVD dash R). iDVD is also compatible with other disc media formats:

DVD+R (DVD plus R) is a similar, but competing format.

DVD-RW (DVD dash RW) and DVD+RW (DVD plus RW), which are rewritable media.

Note: All SuperDrives (Apple's internal DVD burner) support DVD-R media, but older SuperDrives may not support the other media types.

You can find low prices on the Internet for large-quantity bundles of discs. One of our frequent shopping sites for DVDs (and mini DV tapes for our digital video camera) is www.TapeAndMedia.com.

A DVD disc officially claims to hold 4.7 GB (gigabytes) of data. But due to various factors ranging from marketing hype to variances in techniques for translating bits to gigabytes, you really have approximately 4.3 GB of space to work with, or about 90 minutes of video (including video used in motion menus). That's still a lot of data storage, especially compared to the 650700 MB (megabytes) of storage space you get on a CD.

iDVD allows a total of 99 movies and slideshows (in any combination) on a single DVD disc. Of course, the length of your movies, the number of images in your slideshows, and how much DVD-ROM content you want to include on the disc will affect exactly how many movies and slideshows will actually fit on your DVD.

If you don't have a SuperDrive

Even if you don't have a SuperDrive, you can still create, customize, and preview an iDVD project on your Mac. But you must have a SuperDrive to burn an iDVD project to a disc. You cannot burn iDVD projects using a third-party, external DVD burner. You can build an iDVD project on a Mac that doesn't have a SuperDrive, then archive the project, take it to a Mac that does have a SuperDrive, and burn it to a DVD on that Mac. See page 216 to learn about archiving iDVD projects.

What iDVD does not do

You do not use iDVD to create content, but to organize and present content that you've already created in another application. Before you create an iDVD project, you need to have some content available, such as iMovies, QuickTime movies, or still photos with which to create a slideshow.