@wii: It's been a while since I last encoded avi to DVD because I now have a DVD player with USB in and a USB pen so I can download videos and put it on the pen to watch it on my plasma screen
But when I encoded videos I used several programmes....I remember using Virtual Dub and TMPGenc Plus and I think I also tried AVI2DVD. But you can learn a lot from this page:
http://www.videohelp.com/