If I understood your question correctly then any of the main CD/DVD
burning software will let you do that. Just select the .avi(s) and
start the burn. No decoding needed, the result is a standard CD/DVD
which can be played on any player capable of handling an avi movie.

No, I don't mean to burn it into data format. I'm talking about
transcoding it into an ISO, to burn it into dvd format. Thanks.
Starting as an .avi, transcoding to ISO, burning the ISO to DVD format.

I like DeVeDe which is in the repos and it handles avi as well as flv and
many other formats. It is fairly barebones but works well and is easy to
use.

One question, why would you want to burn as an iso in-stand of avi?

DeVeDe creates an ISO file that when burned, becomes a DVD format and can be
played on a standard DVD player.

Yes, exactly! I hope the original questioner will confirm that this is what
he was looking for - or clarify the question if it is not.

But, correct me if I am wrong. Isn't the CD/DVD just the player and the OS
is what
plays/shows the movie. And if the dvd is regional coded, it will not play
all DVD's
as ISO's. But will play AVI's with no trouble.

Sorry to be so late commenting on this, but there seems to be some confusion. I
am a video professional, so perhaps I can clear it up.

An ISO is a disk image, that can contain various types of data, from a distro,
to a bunch of photos. It can normally be mounted as a virtual drive.

When it comes to burning a DVD in the correct format for a domestic DVD player,
the movie(s) must be "authored". DeVeDe will do this for you, and when you look
inside the image it creates, you will see a VIDEO_TS folder and an AUDIO_TS
folder - the AUDIO_TS will be empty because that's for multiple languages. In
the VIDEO_TS folder you will see various files, including .VOB files - these are
in fact Mpeg-2 files, created by the authoring program, but the whole structure
is how your DVD player expects to find it.

Don't worry about country codes - by default it will have region 0 which is all
countries. (I'm not sure how/if you can set region codes in DeVeDe).

There is a tutorial on using DeVeDe as an authoring tool at
http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/75/

My friend wants it in DVD format so he can play it on his DVD player. I
just hook my laptop up to my tv and run the .avi.

i use deeveedee from the software centre this puts it into an iso then i use k3b
from the centre as well this burns it to disc in dvd format

I think there's a bit of confusion going on here.

AVI is a video container format, a method of multiplexing audio and
video together. ISO is a filesystem specification. You can put what you
want onto that filesystem, not necessarily the contents of a DVD video.
Apples and oranges.

If I understand what you want to do, you have a bunch of .avi files that
you want to transcode to MPEG2, then package that MPEG2 data into a
DVD-Video.

For the transcode job I'd use ffmpeg.

You'll then want dvdauthor to package the MPEG2 data into the various
.IFO and .VOB files found in the filesystem of a DVD-Video.

Finally, you need the cdrtools package with genisofs (formerly named
mkisofs) to make the ISO image you want, then dvd+rwtools to burn that
ISO image to your DVD, although cdrecord/wodim will do that for you in
some cases.

I'm sure there are lots of GUI tools to front this software, but I
always found it easier to learn the command line tools than mess around
with a GUI, especially as the machine I used to do this kind of work was
on the network and didn't even have a screen or keyboard connected to
it, let alone a mouse. More often than not I'd batch process the lot in
a script and have it work overnight.

I have done that but not recently and it was on Windows. I know there
is software in the repositories to do that but can't remember the name. Help
anyone?

Why not just burn the .avi to CD or DVD? That sould do the same thing.

Yes, devede. If you spend 20 minutes browsing the help file, it works 10 times
as well. I've never had better payback for RTFM.