Creating a DVD on the Mac

Recently a number of people have complained on their blogs and to me in person that they were frustrated by the DVD creation process on their PC.

Usually they were using the recommended software that came with their player like ULead, DVDit, SonicDVD, and Roast. They tried to get it all to work together but they just weren’t able to create a finished product. I typically respond that if you want to do something like that, get a Mac because Apple writes the best software for it, their iLife suite of products. The integration between them is excellent, they are easy to use, and are actually quite featureful in comparison to their PC brothers. Since they come free with a Mac Mini you don’t have to spend more than $800 or so to get a real nice setup:

Mac Mini:
512MB DDR333 SDRAM — 1 DIMM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
4x SuperDrive (DVD¬±RW/CD-RW)
56K v.92 Modem
Mac OS X — U.S. English
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
Computer: $774.00
iLife: priceless

The Mac Minis include iLife ’05 which is probably the best suite of digital media software for consumers. I actually made a DVD the other day for my family of my daughter Anna. It took about 10 minutes to put it together, burned a couple copies and dropped them in the mail. Extremely easy, but very satisfying to my parents who are 2000 miles away. It was so easy I decided to put together a little video you can watch to understand what you are missing if you are doing this on a PC.

Sorry its so small on the screen, I’ll do better next time…

Update: I put in a link above because it was taking so long to load without showing anything. If someone knows the magic incantation to get it show progress inline, I’d love to see it. If you open the link in Quicktime it will show the video as it is downloaded.