Oh, how I love the mad geniuses (genii?) of Linux.com. Most of their articles are amazing useful, including  this one, a guide to convert any video file to DVD with open source tools:

You’ve just downloaded the new episode of your favorite video podcast, and you’d like to watch it on your big-screen TV. Unfortunately, the video is encoded in XviD or QuickTime format, which your DVD player doesn’t support. Don’t worry — here’s how you can convert any video file to DVD using dvdauthor and MPlayer.Packages for both programs are available for most Linux distributions and BSDs, so you can install them on your favorite OS easily. Compiling the programs from source isn’t difficult, as long as you get their dependencies right. Both programs provide adequate documentation about the installation. You can burn the final files to a DVD disc with the help of the growisofs utility from the dvd rw-tools suite.

I cannot overstate how useful this article is. It provides easy, simple, step-by-step instructions for creating a video DVD from any source video file(s). And it is truly simple. I just ran through the process to convert an .avi I downloaded from aMule into a video DVD. It’s such an easy process that I’ll never consider doing this in Windows again!

You need to have three packages installed: mplayer,  dvd+rw-tools and dvdauthor. I had all but dvdauthor already installed, so a super-quick apt-get install dvdauthor later, I was ready to go. The end result: a crystal-clear DVD copy of [deleted] that rocked my 16×9 51″ HDTV. Awesomeness, absolute awesomeness.