I realize it takes awhile to burn a DVD, but it's going to take me months to burn all my media at the speed I'm going now. It took me 3 1/2 hours to burn a single DVD. Perhaps converting my avi's to something else?
Well if you want to burn the avi's to be able to play on a dvd player then you'll need to convert and depending on the systems specs may take that long. Unless you had a DVD player that also played DivX then you would just burn as a data disc. Which program are you using too - some are faster then others. Keeping up on the pc maintenance - like disc defrag, disc cleanup, registry cleaner and virus scans?
I'm using Nero 7 premium to burn. And I defrag, scan weekly. I have 4 500gig drives to take care of, so yeah, I degrag quit often.
AFAIK, XVID and DIVX are the same as far as the DIVX player is concerned . For those which are more stubborn, VirtualDub can be set in batch mode to take an input folder full of AVI files and process out with identical settings eg DivX compression. That would certainly take longer but it wouldn't be the root canal that authoring DVD's would be. Also, the fourcc changer utility might be all that's needed for some. GSpot would verify when it rendered the file if the changed setting would work.
You might want to give ConvertXtoDVD a try. Faster than Nero's Vision and does a good job. The trial will leave a watermark but would at least give you an idea on the time difference. Ex. if I use Nero just set to 1 pass encoding a 700 mb avi takes about 1-1/2 hrs. Using ConvertX with high quality encoding takes 1 hour. Based on a pc w/ 2.8 ghz and 1 gig ram.