I'm a little new to this stuff, and I need a little direction. I'll tell you what I'm trying to do and I'd appreciate it if someone with a little more expertise would tell me what I have to do... Here's the scenario:
I have 4 .avi movie files, each either 700 MB or 1.36 GB in size, all totalling about 4.12 GB. What I would like to ultimately do is have all these 4 movies burned onto a single layer DVD disk which will be playable on most standard DVD players...
So, what do I have to do? Where do I start? Which programs should I use? How much coffee should I inhale?
Your input is much appreciated.

If you purchase DVD authoring software such as Ulead DVD MovieFactory, pretty much everything will be done for you - the software will convert your AVI files, author the DVD and even create automatic menus.

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I've often burned 4 - 5 DivX movies on a DVD disc, 'as they were', and they played fine in home stand-alone DVD players. (Of course you gotta make sure your player supports DivX first)

If you want those DivX files converted to DVD then you may find my tutorial useful: http://www.videoforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=5545

I appreciate all your input, but svhs, I think you made a tiny mistake in your tutorial, where you instructed the reader to launch TMPGenc and goto the "Encoder" tab. I search high and low, until I found out that the "Encoder" tab isn't in the TMPGenc program, but rather in the DVD2SVCD program.

Ooops... sorry about that. But I'm glad if it helped.

Yes, it did help, thank you, but I'm left with some unanswered questions...
First and foremost, assuming I've followed the instructions in your tutorial, is there a way I can use the programs listed in your tutorial to create a menu? Here's my scenario again... I have 4 .avi movies. I would like to create a standard 4.7 GB DVD playable on a DVD player (let's assume it has DivX capabilities). Upon popping in the DVD, I would like a menu to come up that asks the user which movie they'd like to view out of the 4 listed. Considering this is my objective, is it necessary to join the 4 movies together using VirtualDub? Or is it possible to do this without joining them and how?
Thanks for your time.

Well... this method is only good for converting a single file on a single disc. Think of the horrible quality that would emmerge from 4 - 5 already heavily compressed DivX files, merged into a single, DVD movie... I wouldn't watch that.
As for the DVD menu's when converting from a DivX movie, I haven't researched on that, it is of no interest to me, it would have made things much more complicated.
Maybe you can improve my method to help more people with this issue.

So the quality would decrease if I were to put 4-5 moves on one DVD? Now, as they are, I can easily fit 4-5 movies on one DVD, but they're only playable on a computer, not a standalone DVD player, and the quality is near DVD quality. That being said, are you saying that the process of converting them to a format playable on a standalone DVD player will decrease the quality? If so, can you explain the logic behind it, considering the quality is great when they're in .avi format on the DVD (800 - 1400 bitrate)?

Well if you put 4-5 DivX movie files on a DVD disc and play them on a PC or in a DVD/DivX player, there's no change in quality. But if you transcode them to DVD format (AVI compressed to MPEG-2), the quality loss will be obvious.