iDVD: Menu assets take forever to encode!

yes they do take a long time. Encoding assets is the longest part of the process. There may (or may not) be some things that are affecting your specific situation but most likely there are two key factors: system RAM and disk space. Because of the way Mac OS X works with UNIX your system drive (which also contains the Movies folder from which your source media is coming from) should never exceed 80 percent capacity as the operating system

…uses the hard disk along with the system RAM to execute its operations. One thing you can do to optimize is check system software updates, upgrade your OS and/or upgrade to iLife 08; all will improve overall performance.

One last thing-the source media you are encoding: if it’s something other than 720×480 DV-NTSC .mov or .dv it will take much longer to encode in iDVD as iDVD will have to convert each file before encoding to MPEG2 which will add time to the process. I’m sure Apple has tutorials or best practices on this on their support site, which is where I recommend you search next. Hope this is of some help to you.

My experience has also been a very long time. Additional ram won’t hurt.

thanks all!