First then, there is no such software as you describe, whether for the purpose of preventing piracy, or otherwise. What you are seeing seems almost certainly to be the result of operator error – that is, of your own ignorance about what you are trying to do.
You may think that a DVD is just one thing. It is not. It can be several things, all quite different from each other.
The first thing it can be is a “Video DVD”, also called a “VDVD”. This is an optical disk with a certain, very particular directory structure on it, and certain, very particular filenames on it, in very particular and exacting formats. This optical disk can be inserted into a stand-alone DVD player and played. It contains video streams, but in a very dated and inefficient form of encoding that requires a huge amount of disk space.
No deviation from the VDVD standard is permitted for such a disk, not even the slightest. Put a prerecorded DVD into your computer. Stop it from playing. Use Windows Explorer to look at the DVD in your drive. Notice that it has two root-level directories, VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. Inside the VIDEO_TS directory there are several files, but none of them have filenames that are anything like the movie that’s on the DVD. Every VDVD must have those directories, and those files with those names. Their actual structure is even more tightly constrained.
The second thing a DVD can be, is what is called an “image” of another disk. There are several different types of images, with the most popular being called “.iso”, after a specification by the International Standards Organization, whose job it is to promulgate and maintain such things. Images are used chiefly for transfer of optical disks by a variety of means including transfer over a network. They have become overwhelmingly popular for this purpose. You will see a lot of these on bittorrent sites.
A third thing is based upon the understanding that a DVD is an optical disk which stores data, period. It does not actually matter what kIND of data it stores. One can, therfore, use it to store data from a computer – any computer. A Macintosh computer can write optical disks containing Macintosh computer files, which another Macintosh computer can read. A Windows computer can do likewise. The Windows computer cannot read a Macintosh DVD, and a Macintosh cannot read a Windows DVD. (THAT is what images are for.)
I can burn a “data” dvd containing any sort of Windows file I care to put on it. However, this will not and can not be a VDVD (run upstairs and see what that is, again). A stand-alone DVD player will reject that disk because it is not in the very exactly structure, with the very exacting filenames having that very exacting structure which is required. A data DVD can be read by other PC’s, but isn’t really intended to be read by anything else.
HOWEVER, there are certain types of video and audio computer files which are encoded in certain ways, which SOME modern DVD players can ALSO read. They can play those .avi files you downloaded. Most players cannot.
Now a VDVD has, as I said, a very old video format that nobody voluntarily uses anymore. It takes, as I said, a huge amount of wasted disk space. A feature film of typical length takes up the entire 4.4 gigabytes of a DVD. Now if you used modern compression on the video, at the same quality, you could fit four or five feature films on one disk in the same amount of space. Most of what you can download uses modern compression, for obvious reasons.
If your burning software is told to make a Data DVD, then it will accept any file that can be stored on your hard disk, and it will not check, notice or care about the file type. You could do this with a bunch of MS-Word documents, or text, or movies, or sound files, or database files, and the burning software wouldn’t check, notice or care. It simply reads the file structures from your hard disk and duplicates them on the optical disk – whether that’s a DVD or a CD, by the way.
But, if the burning software is told to make a VDVD, everything changes. The files must already be in that ancient format, and in the proper strictly controlled layout, or at least very close to it. (The process of changing formats is called “transcoding”, and I told you that burning software is not transcoding software.) More importantly, your burning software cares very much about the filetype and will reject almost anything that doesn’t fit the exact standards.
In particular, if you take your average downloaded movie, it will be in a modern format and the burning software will not even allow you to try to turn that into a VDVD.
If you absolutely insist on doing this in spite of all the warnings, then you must first transcode the downloaded file, to the ancient format. This will take hours of your computer’s time during which you probably won’t be able to do much else, and the file size will expand tremendously. That 700 mB .avi you downloaded will turn into a 4 GB .mpg with nothing to show for all the wasted space.
About the third or fourth time you go through this, you’ll probably decide that it’s time to buy a modern DVD deck that can handle modern DivX-encoding. They cost around US$80 street price. Stay away from the ones that cost very much less than that or you’ll really regret it later.
Now, IF you are making DVD’s for somebody else who just can’t or won’t get a more modern deck, and you aren’t willing to buy it for them, then I suppose it sort of justifies transcodiing to VDVD, but let me know when you think you’ve used up $80 worth of hassle doing it, then go buy them the new deck so you won’t have to anymore.