why can't i burn movies with .avi format?

ffoeg wrote: You can’t use WMP as a substitute for CD burning software. It will not burn anything to CD as a file to my knowledge. All it burns is audio CDS. Get Nero Express, Winamp and Mozilla Firefox. Quit using Microsoft programs. You will have a lot less problems.

Eric.Clay wrote: I hope this will be helpful!

I’ve been looking at this thread a lot recently to try to figure out what’s the best program I can use, preferably one I can use for free. I still haven’t set myself to one specific program but I think I can help a lot of people out. After all, I’ve already downloaded about 41564987656 programs and tried them..

*First off, if you’re NOT going to use a free software then you should use either DVD Santa or ConvertX to DV

-of these two I would choose ConvertX to DVD ( http://www.vso-software.fr/products/convert_x_to_dvd/ ) -although it costs a little more- because I like the simplicity of it. It automatically detects the ratio, and I believe it can auto-detect chapters, although I haven’t tried that yet. You can create chapters and a menu, then leave it to do the conversion -from AVI, Mpeg, Mpeg4, DivX, Xvid, MOV, WMV, WMV HD, DV, MKV, DVD to DVD- and it will burn the disc automatically for you. You can also have the computer shut down once it’s finished.
-The disadvantage of ConvertX to DVD is probably that the interface isn’t as simple as Nero and the menu is not as customizable (e.g. menu buttons aren’t as simply and fully customizable as in Nero). But if you want Nero to do the converting it costs about 40$ more than this product.

-DVD Santa ( http://www.dvdsanta.com/ )does the converting but it doesn’t automatically burn the file once you’ve converted it. You have to click “yes” haha... which is no big deal unless you’re not there, then you can’t, obviously. It also doesn’t create chapters as far as I know and it doesn’t auto-detect the ratio, you have to pick “fullscreen” or “widescreen”... That’s an annoyance to me because I didn’t click on “widescreen” and it automatically forced my widescreen video into a fullscreen... Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like that.
-DVD Santa costs about 5-10$ less than ConvertX to DVD.
-One nice thing about the trial version of this software is that it only showed the banner for about 50 seconds which really isn’t so bad at all considering it’s free.

-I would not choose WinAVI because it doesn’t burn the DVD on its own. A lot of people say it causes audio problems. I did have a small problem with the audio using version 7.6. I wouldn’t use 7.7 because this version seems to be worse. Although, the problem it caused for me wasn’t a huge deal and that could have been due to Nero.
-But WinAVI is probably the easiest to use.. but it costs the same as DVD Santa with MUCH less features

-one program I have not tried is AoA DVD Creator ( http://www.aoamedia.com/dvdcreator.htm ), simply because I haven’t heard a lot about it.

*IF YOU WANT A FREE PROGRAM there are a ton of things to choose from and... I’m not so extremely computer savvy so I like the simpler stuff.

-From all the things I looked at:
-AVI2DVD ( http://www.trustfm.net/divx/SoftwareAvi2Dvd.html )(which I haven’t tried, but apparently it takes 5 hours to convert and doesn’t burn a DVD)
-all the trial versions (my favorite being DVD Santa)

-My favorite is DivX to DVD 0.5.2b ( http://free-codecs.com/DivXToDVD_download.htm ) (the old version of ConvertX to DVD) I don’t know if DivX to DVD 1.99.24 is a free version. The download doesn’t say that it is so I didn’t download it, if I was going to pay for it I wouldn’t get DivX to DVD.
-What it does is it converts the file, that’s it. You can change the ratio to widescreen or fullscreen, etc. but it automatically detects that on its own. Once it’s converted you have to burn it in another program, but this program is fairly simple. This Video turned out to have a quality equal to all the others. The difference with this is that it’s free.

*The reason I haven’t decided on which program to use is simply because I’m not sure if I would rather convert a video file to DVD Video, leave, then burn it myself in Nero using all free programs, or if I want to pay for a program that does it all for me and maybe have a less cool menu because I’m not sure how much I can customize the menu in ConvertX to DVD.

well I hope that helps someone cuz otherwise I’ve just wasted a huge fragment of my life!!!