One option is this: buy a DVD player that will play .avi movies! I got one for Christmas. Wal-Mart...$37. Look for a DVD player that has the DivX logo on the front. The movies will often look small, however, and you can only watch them on compatible DVD players, so you may still wish to convert your movies...if so, understand this:

Original DVD videos (and backups) will always be higher quality than anything you download. The files that you download have probably already been converted once, losing some quality, and further conversion will cause further loss of quality.

If you are going to convert movies to DVD,

1. Make sure they are high quality (not too blocky, fluid motion, good audio)

2. Use good media (Verbatim, Taiyo-Yuden, Hitachi-Maxell)

3. Burn at low speeds (8x if the media supports 16x)

4. See what discs your DVD player supports (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW)

Good Luck