...Just to add a little to the nuggets of wisdom above, the specific "codec" (and there are a few) matters less than getting the AVI encoded to a dvd compliant mpeg2 . Your dvd authoring program will " know " if this requirement has been met and will not normally allow a non- compliant file to be included in the authoring unless it (itself) reencodes it. This is how you can get mpeg2 files ( DVD compliant) from different sourced and still sucessfully author a DVD with it. I frequently finsh small projects from different video editing software/ photo slide show making software and then put them together in Ulead DVDWS2 ( my prefered dvd authoring software ) and it seems ( so far) to have worked well