I've been trying to put a large AVI file onto a CDR, using the Disk Utility in Mac OS X on my PowerPC-based Mac Mini. I'm having trouble.

I create a disk image on the desktop. I drag my AVI file into the disk image, so far so good. Then I go into disk utility, select the disk image, and hit "burn".

The drive immediately spins up to about 10 billion RPM and sounds like a buzz saw. The system completely freezes up for about ten minutes while the drive makes this awful noise. Eventually, it ejects the disc and complains that it couldn't burn the disc, and the system unfreezes.

I've successfully used this drive to burn audio CDs with iTunes, so I know the drive works.

BUT... it only works if I tell iTunes (in preferences/advanced/burning) to burn at 4x.

I think the problem is that this drive (and the disk utility) tries to burn the disc at the maximum possible speed unless I tell it otherwise. But I don't see an option in the disk utility to do that. Only iTunes seems to give me the option to slow down the burn.

Does anyone have any ideas or help?