DVD creation software..or authoring, I think

I need some good reccomendations for burning stuff to a DVD that can be read on a US dvd player. I know that Windows Vista comes with Windows DVD maker, but I'm kinda put off by it: I was trying to fit a coupel episodes of a TV show onto a single-layer DVD, and while normally I could fit 12 or 13 episodes to a disc (just as a data disc), as soon as I wanted to format it to read on players the size of a single episode consumed 2GB, which tells me A) Windows DVD Maker is doing something wrong, or B) I really have no idea what I'm doing.

Please tell me what I need to do to create a fairly basic DVD that'll play. I don't need super-advanced menus or any of that shit; I'd just like to fit 4-5 episodes of a TV show onto a DVD (does it need to be double-layer?), so I can watch it on my TV. Thanks much!

 

I use nero

http://www.nero.com/enu/index.html

I have made many many dvds with lots of episodes of anything...it will automatically downsize the quality settings to fit alot of vids on it. the program within the nero suite is called Nero Vision, and I believe with the proper codecs (and nero's own) you can encode anything.

 

Here's the deal: it sounds like the TV episodes are in AVI files (either Divx or XVid encoding). These are highly compressed files. A 700mb AVI when converted to a DVD format will typically be at least 2gb, and maybe as much as 4gb+. I have tried using Nero as suggested above, but haven't had much luck with it. The quality of the video suffers, or it just doesn't seem to come out right; then again, I haven't spent a lot of time trying to work with it. There are many paid programs that will do what you need, but I think the free DVD Flcik will work work fine. You can add several video files, and configure it so that each new file is a chapter. that way you can just use the "Next Chapter" button on your remote to skip to the next episode. I have used DVD Flick fairly extensively and always had great results. Here's the download link:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/DVD_Flick_d5530.html
And the user manual/how-to guide is available in PDF (Adobe) format here:
http://www.dvdflick.net/guide.php (the DVD Flick forums are found at this link too)
If you need to create menus, here's a freebie:
DVDStyler http://www.majorgeeks.com/DVDStyler_d5728.html (I haven't used this, but it looks OK; it might do the entire job of converting and burning too)

I hope this helps! Good luck!

[dlb]
:major

 

Thank ypu, DLB. I forgot about DVD Flick.