Terribly simple project play only on the Mac Pro Tower

I am new to dvdsp. My dvd is a slideshow ONLY. No video footage. It plays fine in the simulator, and on the dvd player on my Mac Pro Tower (OS 10.6.7, Quad core Intel Xeon x 2,@ 2.4 GHz with 8 core mem. 8GB).
On my Sony dvd player (dvp-ns50p about 6 years old) I get "cannot play this disk".
On my laptop, (mac 1.67 GHz PowerPC G4) I get "supported disk not available".
I imported 99 still jpegs from Adobe Bridge, dragged them to the play button. Added a couple of songs for the soundtrack. I put a photo from the slideshow for the "theatre" template for a one button menu. I threw in a loop from garage band so the menu page would have a little music. Slideshow. That's it.
I did the step of convert to track, and of linking the slideshow button.
When I changed the First Play option to go straight to the slideshow, now the whole program just goes down. "Quit unexpectedly".
There are a bunch of numbers I don't understand, but two notes that may be of help:
Exception Codes: Kernal_Protection_Failure@0x0000000000000180
and
Crash Thread:40

The one unorthodox thing that I did was, at first it wouldn't burn the disk because it didn't see a video track. It's just a slideshow, so when I deleted the video icon in the graphical tab it was fine and burnt no problem. But the dvd player and the laptop can't read it. I have tried both Sony dvd+rw and memorex dvd+r.

I am an idiot. HELP! (I don't even understand what follow topic and add signature is for.)
thx
doug

Hi Doug - I doubt you are as daft as you say.

The slideshow function in DVDSP has long been a source of problems for people. So much so that I frequently work around using it, unless I really can't avoid it. What I tend to do is use FCP or even Quicktime to stitch together the images and export that as a piece of video. This gets compressed to MPEG2 at a suitable bit rate, and then imported to DVDSP for authoring.

I would strongly advise you to follow the same pattern - you may get lucky with a slideshow, but in my experience it's less likely than working around it.

Did you remember to set the 'first play' item for your disc? This needs to be done in order for any DVD set top box to play the disc... DVDSP defaults to the first menu created, but you can easily change it to a track - in fact there are good reasons why you should make a track the first play item - it will help make your disc more compatible with a wider range of players.

You have already set the slideshow as a track - good move - but you will come up against a problem with the number of markers that a track can have. By default, you are allowed to create 99 markers in a track only. Slideshows generally insert more markers than you'd believe and by converting to a track it may inadvertently be creeping over the 99 limit.

Yup, I know it should be clever enough to tell you this if it happens, but it isn't!

You should also try making two tracks - one with half the number of items in that then ends and goes straight to the second slideshow (set as a track, too).

However, the best advice is to use a program like Final Cut Pro to create the footage and go from there. It will definitely work if you do :-)

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