I’d call it fairly normal behaviour for Nero. I don’t use Nero at all, anymore. Sounds like it’s getting through conversion, but blowing up during the burn…
There are two parts to this task. First, convert the .avi to video DVD format. Take a prerecorded DVD, put it in your drive and look at it with Windows Explorer. Notice the directory structure. Notice the file names. Notice that you can’t tell what’s on this disk from the filenames. Notice the file sizes.
That structure, and those names, are required for a DVD player to recognize and play a video disk. So task #1 is to convert the file from it’s .avi structure, to this VIDEO_TS sorta structure. That, as you have seen, takes hours. And it’s all waste. While the file size swells, you get absolutely nothing in return except wasted time and wasted space. Quality will be, at the very best, equal to the .avi. It will never be better, and most likely a little worse.
Now having created that structure, task #2 is to burn it to a disk. These tasks are quite severable. You can even sever them with Nero, by telling Nerovision to output to a folder on your hard disk, rather than burn to a DVD. It’s hidden in the options somewhere there. But having converted it with Nero does NOT mean you also have to burn it with Nero.
If I were you, I’d get separate programs for those tasks. I generally use a program called Super for most conversions except those involving Real Media. It works well enough, though support is pretty spotty. It’s also a ltitle intimidating, what with all the available options. So I suggest you try some others.
After the conversion, you should have that same VIDEO_TS structure in your output folder, and you’ll just burn the entire contents to a DVD as if it were a bunch of data files. It’s the structure that’s critical, not anything special about how it’s burned.
Or you may find a conversion program whose output is a disk image like an .iso file, or .bin and .cue files. These get handled and burned, as disk images, and most burner software has provision for these.
For burning, just about every program I’ve ever tried has proven superior to Nero for the purpose. You really don’t have much to lose in this area.