Burning DVD with Roxio Toast 20

Found it. I had to click the Switch to Classic button.

Then you can get to the other settings. In the right column, you'll then see something like this:

You can simply choose Best from the Quality drop down menu. Or you can choose Custom, and then this palette will appear.

DO NOT change the video format. MPEG-2 is the only compression version set-top players expect for a video DVD. Nothing else will work.

There are two bitrate sliders. Those were intended to deal with old players from, oh, over a decade or more ago. You set the maximum to where you want it for the best quality. The average slider is for old players that can't decode a high bitrate fast enough to keep up. They then use the lower quality and lower bitrate files.

You can also use the Blu-Ray plugin however I see little difference in sharpness between that and the HD setting in Toast. I also found recently that I had my DVD output set to 4k default (to match my TV) and after I set to auto the picture was much improved.

There are a few things to consider.

1. If your source video is HD (1080 or 4K), it WILL be scaled down - a LOT. DVDs are the old analog TV resolution of 720 x 480.
2. Take that low resolution image displayed on a large screen digital TV, and it will look fuzzy.
3. How fuzzy depends on your output. You can get decently sharp DVDs, but you need to up the bitrate. The more bits per frame, the more detail that can be reproduced.
4. Higher bitrates take up more space. So the higher you make it, the less runtime you can fit on the disk.

And as I look in Toast 20 just now, I don't even see the choice to set your own output settings. Hmmm.