iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Archiving Your Project

Ordinarily, iDVD doesn’t store any videos, photos, or sounds in your iDVD project file. It remains a tiny, compact file that stores only pointers to those files elsewhere on your hard drive.

That’s why, if you delete or move one of those media files, iDVD will mildly freak out.

POWER USERS’ CLINICHacking iDVD

As you’ve probably discovered, the iDVD program icon isn’t really an application icon at all—it’s a Mac OS X package (Section 4.13). Because Mac OS X programs are often built as packages in this way, they give you a great opportunity to hack the program itself—to change its look, reassign its keystrokes, and so on.

This is a rush, an illicit-feeling power trip, but it doesn’t actually hurt anything. As long as you’ve got your original iLife DVD on hand, so that you can install a fresh, unmodified copy of iDVD if necessary, you can do whatever you want to a copy and still sleep peacefully at night.

You can find step-by-step instructions for a sample Franken iDVD project on this book’s “Missing CD” page at http://www.missingmanuals.com. It walks you through the process of adding a Mute button to the main iDVD screen, so you can shut up the music momentarily without stopping the animation.

In early versions of iDVD, you couldn’t transfer a project from one Mac to another for this very reason. And that meant that you couldn’t design a DVD on one Mac (one that lacked a DVD burner), and then burn it on another. You also couldn’t back up your project file, content ...