When QuickTime (and iDvd) Won't Play Audio from a Video

You may want to try Burn for Mac OS X.
I've not yet used it myself for burning video to play back in a standard DVD player, but the documentation says that it'll encode in any format which ffmpeg supports. There's a list of those formats here: http://ffmpeg.org/general.html#SEC3.

This problem only seems to occur when I'm using the H264 codec. The half hour program I created exported from Final Cut Pro and imported into iDVD with no problem. The preview on iDVD sounded fine, but the disk image I created had no audio. Other codecs worked, but didn't look anywhere near as good. But I found a workaround.

I created a separate QT movie of just the audio track. (This worked both when I created an Apple Lossless track out of Final Cut or an AIFF track out of Quicktime 7 Pro.)

Next, in Quicktime 7 Pro, I opened the original full movie. From the Edit menu, I Selected All and Copied the entire movie.

Next I chose the soundtrack only movie and chose Add to Movie from the Edit menu.

Then I opened the Movie Properties window and deleted the extraneous audio track.

Finally, I Saved As a new self-contained movie.

The resulting movie worked in iDVD without a glitch.

This trick did not work the other way round. In other words, adding a new audio track to the existing H264 movie didn't work. But I picked up a clue from some other forum which suggested creating a "shell" movie and adding to it. So don't ask me why it works; I haven't a clue.