I'm new at this stuff and don't understand very much. My adventure in
digital video editing started after I downloaded a bunch of videos from
Google (video.google.com), which can only be viewed using the Google Video
Player. (The videos are not copyrighted.)

I wanted to store the files on DVDs, so why not make them into DVDs that I
can watch on a television DVD player, if I can find a program to convert
from .gvi to a format. Well, I found Naevius, which makes .gvi files into
.avi files. It's very simple to operate. Once I have .avi files, I can add
them to a "project" in Nero, design a menu, and burn to DVD for television.
But I have had a bunch of problems that I don't understand, and would like
some help.

The first thing I don't get is why Nero cannot fit more than about 675 MB of
.avi file onto one DVD. If the file is too big - like one that I just tried,
which is a 703 MB .avi file - when I add the file to the Nero project, it
says this will not fit on a regular DVD and do I want the project quality
reduced automatically to fit in the available space? If I choose No, it
shows the size of the project is 4.44 GB (0.06 more than available). If I
choose Yes, it reduces to around 3 GB.

So not only do I wonder why under 1 GB of data becomes almost 4.5 GB,
but also, how much of a quality reduction will there be in the resulting
movie? I don't want to reduce the quality because this video is already not
very good quality to start with.

Also, sometimes after the conversion from .gvi to .avi, Nero refuses to
accept the file into a project. The error message says something like
"Unable to add video file" with no explanation of why.

In this kind of case, I have found that converting the .avi file to .mpg
format first will cause Nero to accept it. For this conversion I was using
MediaCoder, which is very difficult, I had to fiddle with various settings
(it has dozens of different options, but no help file!) that I don't
understand, but at least the conversion process was quick - about 5 minutes
for a file in the 600-700 MB range.

But occasionally the MediaCoder program wouldn't work; I would add a file to
process, then click Start, and immediately see a popup window saying [sic]
"No file is outputted". This happened with the file I am trying to get
burned onto a DVD right now.

Then I found out there is a newer version of MediaCoder, and installed that,
hoping it would solve the problem. The file I was trying to process with the
older version did not produce that error anymore with the new version, but
there was a different problem, the conversion process was way slow. Like,
instead of 5-10 minutes to convert a file, it would take two hours or more.
Which is a pain because although in previous experiments with MediaCoder the
resulting .mpg files were usually slightly smaller than the original .avi
file, and I needed the file to be slightly smaller for Nero to put it on one
DVD, I had no idea if the .mpg file would be smaller in this case. I let it
complete anyway, and it didn't matter what size the file came out to because
the quality was very very bad.

So, my next experiment in converting this file was done with "Easy Video
Converter" which gives the option of converting to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. I tried
both. The process took over two hours each time. The MPEG-1 file was
smaller, but still way bigger than the original .avi file, and the MPEG-2
file was HUGE - way, way bigger than the MPEG-1 - and of course I cannot use
either of these files for my DVD.

So I tried using VirtualDub to cut the original video down. I figured I
would just clip a bit off the opening credits and final credits to reduce it
enough to fit in that Nero project, but it wasn't enough.

While I'm jumping through all these hoops I'm thinking there must be an
easier way. I'd really like to understand why Nero makes a file grow so much
larger when you add it to a project, and is there another way to accomplish
what I want to do?

Any help at all will be greatly appreciated. I hope no more software will
have to be purchased. I have already invested too much in software.

I use Windows XP. Thank you.