Hi 2little2late,
I know you don't want to hear this but I always use Nero for this. The Ultra edition comes with some pretty nifty tools. The free version you have is poor (I know it came with my external DVD burner).
Roxio seems to be quite popular although I think that's more down to the fact that it comes free with a lot of PC's. I don't like it at all as it's very basic and seems to want to do a lot of hand holding that I think causes more problems than it solves if you know what you're doing.
Forgive me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here buthe problems you are having with formats (and maybe even with Nero) is that your DVD's MUST be in MPEG2 format for them to be burned as a DVD Video that can be played in an external DVD player. You must also burn them as a DVD Video disk and not a DVD data disk (which are two entirely different things). If you can watch your DVD disks on your PC and not on your DVD player then you are probably burning them as the wrong format (ie. as a DVD data disk).
Now, how do you get them as an MPEG2?
You need to convert the files. Try Google for MPEG2 convertors. I have used MPEG2DVD in the past and while it worked most of the time, I just didn't like it. I'd also used AVI-MPEG (it converts lots of formats to MPEG) and it was good. This will also burn directly to a DVD for you which may allow you to get rid of Nero completely.
The one I liked the best was actually Nero Ultra (which is not the version you would have received with your burner - the free version - which I got with my external burner too - is poor). It took you step by step through everything and worked for me 100% of the time. I was also able to burn episodes of programs from the TV and put maybe three or four of them onto one DVD and put a really really simple menu (that just allows you to select the episodes). I'm not into mastering or creating fancy DVD's but the menu you can create is already preformatted, you just change the text. It was simpole and it worked.
Whatever software you get to convert your files to MPEG2, just bear in mind it can take a very VERY long time (I usually leave the PC on overnight to do it). The quickest I have seen is again Nero, takes about the half the time of the others but maybe that was just me!
What problems are you having with Nero?
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