Product Reviews

iDVD is the application that packages the content from iMovie, iPhoto and potentially even GarageBand, and puts on a disc that can played on millions of DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. Version 4 adds some important and impressive new features.

The most evident addition to iDVD 4 is the 20 new themes. These range from the pretty good such as Fish and Road Trip, to the sickly saccharine new Wedding themes. These themes contain a new iDVD feature: AutoPlay. The ability to create autoplay movies that run automatically when your DVD is loaded in a DVD player is something that will give iDVD-created DVDs a more professional sheen.

Commercial DVDs use this feature to play the copyright notice and, quite often, trailers. But you can choose whatever you like. In fact, AutoPlay can be used for an entire disc, creating kiosk-style DVDs. Although they are built into the new themes, you can add AutoPlay movies or slideshows to older themes using another iDVD addition: Map View.

Map View is a feature that will be familiar to professional DVD producers, and one that is useful to anyone producing a DVD with lots of content. It shows you a graphical representation of your DVD, with each menu screen and content element shown as a screen that looks a bit like a 35mm slide. Relevant menus and content elements are linked like an organisational chart, and double-clicking on a content element allows you to preview it.

Photographic slideshows have been beefed up with the addition of transitions and the ability to loop slideshows. Transitions can also be added between menus and sub-menus and between menus, and movies or slideshows.

Less visible than the other new features, but just as important are the new encoder and the

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ability to archive projects. iDVD's MPEG-2 compression is now based on the encoder in DVD Studio Pro and Compressor: the net result is that you can store two hours of video on one DVD disc. But if your project is longer than one hour, you won't be able to use iDVD's background encoding feature, so video footage won't start encoding until you're ready to burn. This significantly extends the time it takes to create a DVD. As with iDVD 3, the more video you put on a DVD the more it will be compressed. So at the two-hour maximum, the quality of your movies will be lower than if the disc was an hour or less.

The archiving feature, which appears in the File menu as Save as Archive, means you can now create iDVD projects on a Mac without a SuperDrive and copy the archive to a SuperDrive-equipped machine for burning. This is especially useful for those of us who use a PowerBook or iBook regularly, but who have a SuperDrive in a Power Mac at home or in the office. It should be noted, however, that if you install iLife '04 on a Mac that doesn't have a SuperDrive, the iDVD installation is switched off by default. You'll have to perform a custom install and ask for iDVD to be installed with the rest of the package.

There's still no support for external DVD burners, which is a big disappointment. External DVD writers are as common these days as external CD burners and crippling iDVD in this way is as daft as preventing iTunes from burning to external CD burners.

This also means that iDVD only supports the DVD-R format, as Mac OS X won't write to DVD-RW and Apple doesn't recognise the existence of DVD+RW.

Mixed bag

We had no problems with the performance of iDVD 4 during our tests, though the discussion pages on Apple's Web site have a significant number of stories from people who haven't been so fortunate. However, creating a DVD and encoding MPEG-2 video is a processor-intensive process, so be patient if you want to make full use of iDVD's two-hour maximum limit.

This is a solid upgrade to an excellent application. The continuing lack of support for external DVD burners is disappointing, but the new features, in particular AutoPlay and DVD Map, are very welcome. Like iMovie 4and GarageBand, iDVD 4 would easily be worth £39 on its own. As part of the iLife '04 package, it's fantastic value.