iPhoto Slideshows and YouTube

Over the past couple of weeks my fiance has been putting together a slideshow for her grandfather's 80th birthday. She's been using iPhoto on my new iMac, and after a bit of trouble getting some old slides scanned (she bought one of these), the results are pretty awesome. The automatic Ken Burns effect combined with music in the background really gives it a professional feel.

She wanted to share the finished product with her mother before the party, so I suggested we post the slideshow to YouTube. I exported the iPhoto slideshow to a quicktime movie using the "Export..." option in the File menu. When I uploaded the finished product to YouTube, however, there was no sound. A quick googling identified the culprit as DRM -- the songs that my fiance had downloaded were protected AAC files downloaded from iTunes. When iPhoto exports to a quicktime movie, the DRM goes with it. YouTube's computers that process the uploaded files can't play the songs.

After choosing some new songs (erm...the same songs sans DRM), I re-exported the movie and uploaded to YouTube again. This time, things looked good -- I started the movie, and the first song began to play. But when the movie got to the end of the first song (there were 3), it went silent. The second and third songs weren't playing. I first thought that I must have incorrectly added DRM'd files to the slideshow again, but that wasn't the case. I played the .mov file locally using Quicktime, and all the songs in the movie played fine.

I'm not positive, but I think what's going on is YouTube is having trouble interpreting the .mov file. A .mov file is a wrapper which contains some encoded video and audio. I think iPhoto is putting the three songs into the .mov file seperately, and YouTube is just grabbing the first one and ignoring the other ones. To work around this problem, I spliced together the 3 songs into one long file using Audacity, and used that as the music for the slideshow. This worked, but it was a combersome process.