dvd buring

Hello, newbie here. Please help-I am new to burning dvd's, but ready. I give the movie off of utorrent or limewire, i then convert to avi-using avi2dvd or dvd flick-i have used both. No matter what, i put it in my home player and there is sound but no image, picture, movie-whatever you want to call it. What am i doing wrong? This morning i installed dvd flick-forum suggested it and the same thing. I have wasted numerous dvd-just bought the dvd-r's. Please help-any suggestions, burning 101 , somethnig, anything-greatlly appreciated!

 

Some DVD burning and authoring applications have the facility to burn the DVD files to a folder on your computer instead of straight to DVD. The advantage of this is that you can then see if your computer can play them first. I use Adobe Premiere Elements 2 for this. Once I've checked if they look and play properly, I use different DVD burning software (sonic record now dx) to put the video onto DVD. This seems to have a higher success rate and means that if the burn fails, I still have the files on the computer to burn to another DVD.

Once converted, do the movies play at all on your computer.
I was wondering if it was a codec problem with the actual software you used to convert from one format to another.

Have you got any rewritable DVDs ? If so, you could experiment with these until you find the best solution.

There is a lot of useful information about all things video on http://forum.videohelp.com/?sid=f0c0953efd8641ad2529dbdece0e1844