Which version of Creator do you have? I don't have it but I have the most recent Roxio Toast which is the mac version. It now allows you to set both the audio & video compression levels, specifically the bit rates. The audio also allows you to choose between PCM & Dolby Digital (AC-3) which is vaguely similar to mp3.
It sounds to me your freezing is due to the overall encoding bit-rate is too high. Best to have this 9.6 Mbps or under. Video maximum which includes motion estimation is best at 8.2 or less. 16 bit PCM audio uses just over 1.5 Mbps. Digital dolby-AC-3 encodes at up to 600 kbps or 0.6 Mbps. Toast offers a maximum of 448 kbps or 0.448 Mbps. That added onto video encoded at around 8 Mbps = about 8.5 Mbps. Video encoded at between 4-8 Mbps is fine! FYI the early commercial dvd's were all encoded at around 4 Mbps. But it may also depend on the quality of your source material. I use full PAL quality original source files for my general editing & dvd mastering. (But for material that's already been extracted from dvd (that's already compressed) & is then compressed again to either VCD/SVCD/Mpeg4 quality & size, then the quality of the source material will depend on how much compression used & quality of the encoders & quality of settings & perhaps the skills of the user.)
Even though the dvd definition allows for encoding is 10.08 Mbps (which includes requirement for video, audio & menus.) Few if any actual set-top dvd players on the market are built to handle this. In fact, many struggle to play anything above 9.5 Mbps or even less. So it's safest to try to keep your overall (video + audio) encoding bitrate at 9.2 Mbps or less. Try to stay away from PCM audio. AC-3 is arguably just as good & doesn't stress the player. It uses a fraction of the bit-rate & is much smaller in file size so leaving more space for video & menus, etc.
Encoding settings also depend on the length of the material & the disk you're outputting to. To fit 2 hrs or more onto a dvd-5 format disk (4.37 GB) means you will probably need to drop the video bit-rate down. But for a DVD-9 format disk, you should be fine so long as the overall bit-rate for encoding doesn't exceed much beyond 9 Mbps.
Also keep in mind, some older computers have dvd players that don't like high bit-rates. Your problem definitely sounds like a bit-rate problem to me. I hope this helps.
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