Colleague X has a burning question from a friend:
Hey, have you done a 911 recently about burning a movie to a DVD? A friend was asking and I realized I have no real idea how this is done in the post-iDVD world.
No I haven’t, but it’s time I did.
It’s true, now that Apple has filed iDVD under “Old Technology That Interests Us Not” your options aren’t as clear as they once were. Let’s see if we can bring some clarity to the situation.
To begin with, iDVD, though dead to Apple, still works with Mavericks. So, it’s simply a matter of laying your hands on a copy, installing it, and going about your burning business. Apple no longer sells iLife ’11 (which carries a copy of iDVD 7.1), but you can find a copy on Amazon for $40. I’ve seen copies on eBay going for as little as $10.
Of course you can’t be sure how long iDVD will continue to work. It is, after all, now an unsupported app. Thankfully, it’s not your only option.
Roxio has just released its $100 Toast 12 Titanium. New features include live screen capture, support for exporting video to a greater number of devices, and the ability to burn HD videos to DVD. For our purposes it’s an option because it’s supported under Mac OS X 10.5 – 10.9, and—like iDVD—converts video to a compatible format and offers menu templates. It’s easy to use, does far more than burn discs, and gets the job done.
Roxio’s Toast 12 Titanium provides a load of disc-burning options.
If all you want to do is get that job done, you could turn to the free and open source Burn. It allows you to burn data, audio, and video discs. When you create a video disc you must ensure that the source movies are in the MPEG-2 format that it demands. (It will convert .m4v movies for you, but not some forms of QuickTime movies.) And while the resulting disc will play, don’t expect fancy menu templates or themes. You get bare-bones titles, navigation buttons, and little else. But hey, free.
Burn doesn’t offer many bells and whistles but at least the b & w it does have are free.
Which your friend chooses will have quite a bit to do with their budget and how they want their resulting discs to look. For those rare occasions when I need to burn a movie to DVD I’ve been able to get by with the copy of iDVD that I still have on my Mac. But I also like what Roxio’s done with the latest version of Toast Titanium. If I was interested only in a quick-and-dirty disc recording for testing purposes I might turn to Burn.