Not one of my better days

This has not been one of my better days as I have got next to nothing done. It all started when our son needed a football highlights reel. He's a junior in high school starting as the varsity quarterback and a number of universities have started to make inquiries and the replies need to go back ASAP. I had a DVD of last year's highlights and a couple more for this year so, I thought, how hard can this be?

Slideshow: Apple disasters

I'd used Apple's iDVD before so that seemed a good way to go. I ripped the DVDs to MP4 files and loaded them into Adobe's Premiere Pro to clean them up. What a terrific program! There's a lot to learn but it is pretty straightforward. So it was, a few hours later, I had my edited footage.

Hmmm. Why not use Adobe's DVD creation tool, Encore, rather than iDVD? An hour later I had figured out why … this is a very complicated and counterintuitive tool (unusually so for Adobe). OK, scrap that. Let's go back to plan A and move all of the content over to iDVD.

An hour later I had my DVD project set up. I could run it in the iDVD interface and everything worked great – it looked good, it worked well … I was ready to burn a disk.

Whirr, whirr, clunk … 20 minutes later, I am shown the error message: "Error During Track Initialization. There was an error during track initialization and iDVD can't continue burning this DVD (the disc has not been touched yet!). Select 'Delete Encoded Assets' from the Advanced-menu and try burning this project again."

Huh? OK, let's try what Apple recommends and delete the encoded assets. I start burning again and 20 minutes later I get that same message. Maybe the Mac needs restarting … nope, restarted, ran up iDVD again, loaded the project, and nyet. Hmmm. Maybe the Mac needs reprogramming with an axe … nope, I'll save that as a last resort.

How about saving the DVD content to a disk image? Twenty minutes later, same problem. Let's see what other users have to say … Google returns 15,600 hits for "idvd Error During Track Initialization"! Terrific. These hits have dates as long ago as 2005! What the %$#@?

Does Apple have anything useful to say on the topic? Nope. Indeed, it rather looks like Apple doesn't give a rat's derriere where the topic of iDVD and its problems are concerned. The number of people posting about serious, show-stopping issues with the program is astronomical!

I do, however, get a clue from one posting that suggests checking that your disk drive is healthy. OK, so I run Apple's Disk Utility which grinds away at the boot drive for a few minutes before admitting, rather grandly and totally unhelpfully, that the disk is screwed and Disk Utility wants nothing more to do with the whole mess as it can't fix a volume that OS X boots from. Great.

So, I boot from the install DVD and run Disk Utility and (I am not that surprised) I get much the same result. I try booting in single user mode to the command prompt and running the fsck utility. Even better! One in every three runs produces a different error message! How can the same procedure run several times in succession produce different results? What am I doing wrong? Should I have sacrificed a chicken or something before I started?