G4 and burning .avi to DVD No Can Do HELP Before Christmas

Question

I have a G4/500mhz and I bought a OWC Mercury 1.2ghz processor upgrade and also bought 2x's 512 ram = 1gig(maxed out)
I'm a Virgin @ making movies from .avi files need help bad!
Now I tried to burn a .avi using Toast it would start to Encode and everytime the encoding would get towards the end Toast would crash, when I put the .avi into iDVD it said it was to large to fit onto a DVD as I stated above this is all new to me.
I even made a seperate Account for burning the .avi to DVD thinking that it was using a lot of Ram and Processor and if anything came up example: Software Update, System Optimizer, any tool my Mac would give me a kernal panic and I would let my Mac run overnight so no one would try to use the Mac,
my main question is what can I do or is there anything that I can I do so I can burn .avi's to DVD using my system?
I talked to a friend of mine he has a PB G4-133mhz and does this all the time
G4/1.2ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   Pioneer DVR108 Super Drive
G4/1.2ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Hi
iDVD will not work with PC-based .avi media; you would need to convert it to dv I(f that is possible) in order for iDVD to work with it.
You may want to post in the iDVD forum; I could not begin to tell you whether or what you would need to convert it, or if indeed to is possible without substantial loss of quality.
If you can open the file in iMovie, you may be able to export it to iDVD.
If you friend does exactly this, I would suggest you ask him/her the precise software/procedure being used.
"..there is also an application AVI->QuickTime that can convert AVI files to QuickTime .MooV files on the Macintosh. .." I found this HERE, doing a quick google for ".avi format"