I think I finally solved a problem I’ve been having a problem with for a while.  I’ve been making DVDs of the Suburbia Roller Derby bouts for some of the rollergirls to review and learn from.  Unfortunately every time I made a DVD the video ended up beging very choppy / stuttery.  The movie in iMovie was fine and the preview in iDVD was fine, but as soon as I burned a DVD or disc image I’d end up with choppy video.

I did some googling and came across the topic iDVD and choppy video in the final product.  It was started at the end of 2006 but there was a recent post mentioning Perian being the cause.  Persian is a “free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats”.  I had originally installed it for Flash video (FLV) support to burn some other derby leagues from YouTube to DVD for the team.  After uninstalling Perian I seem to no longer have the choppy video problem with iDVD.  I’ve only burned a disc image so far, but they had the same problem when I had Perian installed.  I’m going to burn a DVD in a little bit confirm.  If this is the solution I will be very happy.  I’m still annoyed that I need to “Share” my video in iMovie to get it into iDVD (a slow process) and can’t easily create chapters in iDVD (without using a GarageBand hack) but at least the final product won’t mess with your eyes now.

There are also some posts on the Perian support forum, such as perian performance – lags in movies which offers some other suggestions, but since I don’t currently need FLV support anymore I’m going to stick with the “uninstall Perian” solution for now.

Update: Woo!  The Perian-free burn is smooth!