AVI compression

I’ve recently aquired a new cd burner and I have all of these avi files that I would like to put onto cd to free up some hard drive space. My only problem is.. these avi files are HUGE, roughly 177,800 KB each. That makes them a little hard to burn, assuming I can only fit about four files to a cd.

I was wondering if there was a way I could compress these files so that I could fit more onto a single cd. I’ve heard that you can shrink these files by using mpeg converters and the like, but everytime I try this solution, the file actually gets bigger.. I’m pretty new to all of this so any and all help will be greatly appreciated!