Posted Thursday, June 10, 2004

Odds and Ends: Another iTunes 4.6 Fix, and Getting iDVD 4 and DVD Studio Pro 3 DVDs to Work in Mac OS 9

Two quick nuggets from the Department of Troubleshooting.

Share big. One concerns iTunes 4.6, and it comes from Dan Frakes at MacFixit, who writes, "iTunes 4.6 fixes the bug where you couldn't share iTunes Libraries with more than 28,899 tracks."

iTunes 4.5 had a bug that prevented the sharing of truly mammoth music libraries. MacFixit has more details about the bug fix.

DVD compatibility. Over at Macintouch, a couple of readers have complained that DVDs they've authored in iDVD 4 and DVD Studio Pro 3 do not work in Mac OS 9 systems. I've confirmed this myself -- OS 9.x displays an error message when you insert a disc authored in either iDVD 4 or DVD Studio Pro 3.

As it turns out, I'm in the process of reviewing DVD Studio Pro 3 for Macworld, and I had the opportunity to speak with its product manager this morning. Both programs share the problem, he said, which deals with "an optimization we made for OS X." He added, "We'll get that fixed."

In the meantime, there is a workaround, and oddly enough, it's described in an elderly Apple support document: Press Command-Option-I when inserting a DVD, and OS 9 will "try to make the disc available on the desktop as an ISO formatted disc instead of a UDF formatted disc."

This worked for me, but it's of little comfort. DVD developers need the confidence that their discs will play anywhere, and the fact that iDVD 4 and DVD Studio Pro 4 discs won't play in OS 9 shakes that confidence. Here's hoping Apple fixes this problem soon. I'm eager to use DVD Studio Pro 3 for the DVDs that we produce here at Avondale Media, but, sigh, our titles need to be compatible with Mac OS 9 systems.