ok, used DVD Flick and Imgburn [which it invokes to do burning to DVD].
There are a number of tutorials out on Youtube that illustrate the use of DVD Flick - it seems to be quite popular.
I have a knack for breaking things that work "perfectly" for everyone else. Like my recent weeklong pilgrimage through the quagmire of "cloning" a windows 7 drive so that I could move to a bigger hard drive. easy, right? I spent about 50 hours on that one using every 'good' package known. the final answer was a breeze however, thanks to Paragon.
Anyway, so I took an ordinary movie of just over 1GB size, and avi file that plays beautifully - looks and sounds perfect.
Burned the project, burned it to DVD, took 2 hours [why?], and finished the DVD with no errors.
The folder on the DVD looks right, smells right, the menu displays right, but it won't play on anything known to man. It will load up, display menu, I hit the "play" button, my hard drive lights up like its caching something, but nothin happens. just sits.
Tried it on my newish sony blu-ray player, on computers, used various software players, and at least the results are consistent.
so if any of you are DVD Flick experts, pls advise.