While originally only available for Macs with a SuperDrive, it is now included at no additional charge with all new Macs; from iDVD 6 onwards, Apple supports the ability to burn projects with third-party optical drives.

The program uses the concept of themes to allow the easy creation of DVD menu systems. The themes have 'drop zones', onto which movies or photographs can be dropped. The theme automatically animates the drop zones if necessary. iDVD has 100 different Apple-designed animated themes, many with different submenus that match the main theme for additional content such as chapters or other extras in either widescreen 16:9 or standard 4:3 formats. These themes can be applied to multiple levels of your DVD. Apple's description of iDVD states that it comes with 150 themes, and that count includes all the submenus of each theme.

The program integrates with the rest of the iLife suite. iMovie projects and iPhoto slideshows can be exported directly to iDVD. In the case of iMovie projects, scene selection menus are automatically created in accordance with chapter markers that are set within iMovie. The application also has a 'Media' area that provides access to the user's iTunes library, iPhoto library and Movies folder at any time, and there is a map view, which shows the current project's menu system in a graphical form. Another feature is the ability to hide or show an approximation of the 'TV safe area' (because old televisions often cut off some of a video's outer areas). iDVD also includes a 'OneStep DVD' function, which will automatically rewind the currently connected DV camcorder and burn a DVD of the video footage that is on the tape.

iDVD can also integrate with Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro.

The iDVD software comes with fonts that are not installed to prevent them from being available to other applications by default. The fonts are located here: /Applications/iDVD.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts/