Video Conversion Program

[Fierce Critter]

I recently acquired a DVD burner. My intent for now is to use it to download videos of things I'd like to watch on my TV and not on my computer monitor.

Sofar, the only sucessful way I've managed to convert files from their downloaded format into DVD is to let Nero do it itself. But it takes pretty much realtime to run the conversion/burn. And yesterday, an hour-long video file I burned and watched was horrible - the sound eventually totally un-synched to the video, and was pretty hard to watch. A half-hour episode of South Park did better, but not totally.

I've tried downloading and using some freeware and shareware to see what would work if I wanted to crack or purchase a program, but nothing is working really well, if at all. One I tried is WinAvi Video Converter. Simple to use, but the result is video files being separate from audio files, and when Nero tried to burn it, the audio came over but not the video.

Any suggestions for a good program for this purpose? Something simple that works?