Anyone with a Mac know anything about DVD burning? I've actually never burned a DVD-R before on one, and was wondering how one takes say an mp4 and converts it to something playable on any old DVD player? I'm sending the new Louis CK download as sort of a gag (but cool) gift to relatives. I want to make these playable in the most common way (dvd player) and I'm the only member of my family with a Mac that I know of. This much I know:

1) Simply inserting a DVD-R to my iMac, dropping the file in finder will not produce what I want. It basically makes something only playable in a mac.

2) Back in the day (circa 2002) I use to use Roxio Toast on my old iMac to do CD/Data burning but I see version 11 is like 99 clams. I'm one of those assholes who won't pay for software.

3) I tried to get my head around the Burn program but it sucked and I deleted it. It immediately compressed the file to a smaller mpeg, not even close to suitable for me. I downloaded the nice 1.2 GB HD version and I want to retain the quality AND have it play in any old dvd player....

4) Anyone know of a good free program that can do this?

If I understand your request correctly, Visual Hub will do the trick. It's legally available for free. The creators stopped updating it a few years ago (except for a new version for Lion) but it's still out there: http://www.techspansion.com/

I use version 1.30 on Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) for compiling various movie file formats to DVDs. The interface is intuitive ... you can drag and drop files into the main window ... they don't necessarily have to be the same format. The app does all sorts of conversions but if you click on the DVD tab, you can "author as DVD" (an .iso image file) and "Burn When Done," which will burn to your Mac's default DVD drive. If you're using an external drive, it'll get confused. If that's the case you can still get the job done but you'll have to use another app (I think Burn will do it) to burn the .iso file to playable DVD.

I hear good things about Visualhub, unfortunately the download for the app is no longer available, just the updater. Everywhere I go it just gives me the Lion updater not the regular app download. I don't even run Lion OSX on my mac.

Oh man, sorry 'bout that. I don't understand why they don't just provide the earlier versions. I'll check around, maybe there's something else...

Thanks for the all the suggestions guys. A very kind SB member sorted me with a copy of Toast. Problem solved. Love Macs but sometimes they make the simplest tasks difficult.