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I just finished burning my first West Wing DVD. It's not a scientific process at all - I have about 12 episodes on my TiVo (and a new one every week) that I'm putting onto DVD, two per disc. I enjoy the show tremendously, but want to regain the use of the space on my TiVo, so for $3 a pop it's worth putting them onto DVDs.

I went all out, too. I took the credits/title screen and stripped out the audio, then compressed it to a nice 30 seconds. I took the 50-second theme song, found a point at which it loops back around at 37 seconds, and sped it up to 30 seconds. Both done, of course, so that I can have a nice 30 second loop, iDVD's limit. The result is a pretty spiffy little title screen if I do say so myself.

Next, I chose a theme. As you can see here (below), I went with the one that shows the black and white faded version behind a smaller color version ("Picture in Picture" it is called). Two episodes per disc equal about 1 hour and 25 minutes of video, complete with chapter markers (set at each commercial break). There's no way to have chapter selection for more than one movie, so I simply bring two episodes into the same iMovie project, strip out the commercials, and do the chapter work there. I pop it into my saved iDVD template and burn burn burn.

Now what's interesting is that I'm probably doing something illegal somewhere in here, but I fail to see why or how. I am not selling the DVDs. They are purely for my own use - and I mean that quite literally, because I haven't been able to talk anyone into watching it with me besides Dave. Yet what I've done is no different, really, than leaving episodes on my TiVo so that I can watch them at any time. The TiVo is portable - I could plug it in to someone else's TV at someone else's house and watch the episodes there. Sure, it'd be easier to loan them a DVD, but I can also loan people audio CDs without issue. Or my purchased DVDs. Either way: nobody's lost money on this deal, the makers of DVD media have made some money, and I'm satisfied that I can watch episodes of my favorite TV show for years to come.

I did run into some annoying things in iDVD. For example, when you freely position titles, you can't drag more than one title at a time, nor does holding shift constrain a title to a vertical or horizontal axis. This makes aligning titles tedious. Next, there seems to be no way to save a custom theme. (Correction: there's a "Save as Favorite" button.) I've created the media, so recreating my custom theme shouldn't be that hard. Still, it'd be nice if I could save it. (Correction: duh.) A few other minor things here and there annoyed me, but I'm probably really in need of a DVD Express (DVD Studio Pro being overkill).

P.S. "Arctic Radar" and "Swiss Diplomacy" were the subject of the first DVD, as the screenshot indicates. I think I actually have 9 more currently on the TiVo, so by the time I get done with those around next Friday, I'll have six discs. Total cost: $18 and a whole lot of time spent burning discs and making sure I haven't made any typos in the chapter titles.

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