I recently used iMovie and iDVD to create a new compilation of a DVD I had created a long time ago with a combination many different complicated and annoying pieces of software – one program to edit the music, another to stitch together photos and sync them to the music as a movie, yet another compress and encode the movie file into a DVD-friendly format, and still one more to put it all together as a DVD image and burn it to a disc. Back then the process for creating homemade DVDs was a nasty bog only a really dedicated geek would be willing to slosh through. So let me first say that iLife is a brilliant software package that makes it really fun and intuitive to put together slideshows and home movies and burn them to a disc that looks and feels (semi-) professional. It truly does play Falkor to the Swamps of Sadness you and your pal Atreyu used to have to endure. (Give me a new name, Bastian)
All that being said, why isn’t there a completely blank theme for iDVD? Sometimes I don’t want your stupid menus and graphics, Apple. What, should I choose Sunflowers or Vintage Vinyl for a movie to be played at my friend’s funeral? As a company that cares about aesthetic, you should be able to appreciate that.
The closest thing to a blank slate is the Full Frame theme that can be found in the iDVD 6 themes. But even that has an annoying semi-transparent bar across the middle of the screen. Soooo…after an hour or so of unsuccessful googling around for a solution, I took it upon myself to hack up the Full Frame theme and remove the non-essentials. Thankfully, the iDVD theme files are just xml files, so it only took a few guess’n’tests to find and delete the menus and images.
Here’s a zip file containing the hacked Full Frame theme. Here’s what you need to do to use it: Unzip the file somewhere, then copy the three files that you just unzipped to <your_user_home_folder>/Library/Application Support/iDVD/Installed Themes/iDVD 6/
WARNING: This will replace the previous Full Frame theme. So if you’re going to want the normal Full Frame theme again, either back it up or don’t do this.
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