playing a quicktime file on dvd player

Jeff, you're making this way too hard. Just find the money to buy Toast 7 and the process becomes very easy. The right tool for the job oftentimes isn't free.

And again, I ask, what format are you exporting the file as from QuickTime, and where in the process is it breaking down?

Jeff, a good place for this sort of information is http://www. videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9

I believe ffmpegX is the applicaiton of choice for non-Toast users who want to author video DVDs from various video file formats.

If you can play it in QT you can use it in Toast 7 and make a DVD using the Video tab. It will take quite a while to transcode to MPEG-2 and if it is small and has a low bitrate it will look pretty mediocre when upped to 720 X 480 in size.

iDVD cannot recognize an xvid video. You will need to convert it to another format. If you have QuickTime Pro, try exporting the movie as DV.

Then give ffmpegX a try as ThomasG suggested. One way or another, you're going to have to convert that xvid video, either directly to MPEG-2 (and use some other tool to create the files necessary for Popcorn to be able to create a video DVD) or to something iDVD can understand (DV being probably the best choice).

was able to use ffmpegX to change the file to a dv
file. However, now the file is huge (15GB) and
imovie won't let me import because of the size..any
suggestions?

You are doing this the hard way, but you can finish what you've started by placing the DV file in iDVD and let it create your DVD. You don't need iMovie.

The easy way would have been to get either Toast 6 or Toast 7, drag the AVI to the Toast Video window and click the burn button.

With ffmpegx you could have converted the file to MPEG 2 and authored as a VIDEO_TS folder without converting it to DV. Once you have a VIDEO_TS folder you could use DVD Imager to create a video DVD image file to burn to DVD using Disk Utility.

I previously mentioned that there is good advice for working with AVI's at the Mac forum at http://www.videohelp.com . You should spend some time there.

Alternatively, you could buy an inexpensive DVD player that has Divx AVI playback capability and burn your AVI file to a data CD. This should play without any conversion at all.

I need to amend the previous post. Toast 6 has a 90-minute maximum length for video DVDs when Toast does the MPEG 2 encoding. So that probably would not have been adequate for your AVI. Toast 7 can handle much longer movies.

If your movie is less than 2 hours long then iDVD should be able to create the DVD from your DV file.

It seems that you haven't added the movie to iDVD properly. On my version of iDVD I can choose Import from the File menu to add a DV file. You might read iDVD Help for instructions.

Also, it is a good idea to play the DV file with QuickTime to make sure it has audio and that the audio is in sync before using iDVD.