When you buy a DVD burner, it almost always comes with either Nero or Roxio for burning software.
I am not a big fan of either. Nero has destroyed a lot of disks for me, and the tech support sucks rocks. Roxio is much rarer, but it has caused me a lot of grief also. So, what to do?
First question is, what do you need to actually burn to DVD? The answer depends on your DVD player. Newer ones – including many very inexpensive ones – can accept DVD+R disks, and can play .AVI movies encoded with DivX or Xvid. CHeck the manual on yours, look for “DVD+R” and “DivX”.
Most of the movies you download will be in the proper format, so you can burn those files directly to a DVD as if they were data files that you were making backups of, and they will play just fine. They’ll also take up a heck of a lot less room on the disk. You can fit three or four times as much on a single disk, done this way.
If you DO have to convert the files to standard DVD video, so that any DVD player can play them, first be aware that the conversion takes hours to perform, even on a very fast PC. Second, be aware that the size of the converted material will grow a lot.
It may be worth it to you to buy a new DVD player just because of that. It will save you a great deal of time and a lot of disks, and the prices are usually well under US$100. Or you may want to wait and see this for yourself.
Nero has a module called NeroVision, which will do that conversion and do an OK job of it. But you can choose to tell Nero to write the output to your hard disk instead of having it burn onto the DVD. I recommend you do that, and use another program to actually burn the DVD. There are several, and most of them work much more reliably than Nero.
For general burning purposes, I’d suggest Ashampoo Burning Studio.
Sincere advice here: don’t buy cheap DVD blanks. Bargain-bin DVD+R’s will have a high failure rate and turn out not to be a bargain at all. So, unfortunately, will many “name” brands. I suggest you buy TDK, or Maxell as a second choice, but nothing else you’re likely to find at a store in the US. Bad ones include all “house” brands, GQ from Frey’s, HP, Sony, Memorex, and every bargain brand you never heard of from any chain. (That’s my advice, based on my experience, but YMMV and religious wars have been started over this subject.)
Burn your DVD’s at the slowest speed you can stand. Yeah, I know, you got this spiffy new 16X burner, but you’ll have a lot fewer failures if you burn at 4X than you will at MAX. Good burning software has a VERIFY option – use it.
Good luck, however you decide to do it.