Movie formatting for iDVD 4

I'm trying to burn a DVD with some videos from my digital camera using iDVD 4. The videos were automatically transferred to my computer as MPEG-1 files, but neither iDVD nor iMovie will accept that format. Does anyone know how I can change the format of the videos for iDVD (preferably without spending money)? Is there a good web page with a program and instructions that someone would recommend? Any help is greatly appreciated!
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.1.x)  

welcome egd2001 to the  boards of discussions ...
.. ehm, you need 'a little' background knowledge, to understand why this is no trivia task...:
* a TV has a standard, fixed resolution of 720x480 pixel.. your mpegs have a quarter of that.. => poor quality...
* TV has 30 frames per second.. => I'm pretty sure, your mpegs not..
* iM/iDVD are intended to work with miniDV camcorders, both apps work with the same video codec, dv, to import 'lossless' ..
* mpegs are a playback format.. any conversion/processing adds a loss of pic quality, due to the techniqué used for compression ...
* this playback format muxxes audio+video into a data stream, both a 'woven together' ... not easy to seperate that...
Mpeg Streamclip
www.squared5.com
allows to open and convert mpeg1 into 'dv-stream' (look into SC's many export options...) ...
as said, you will realize a (dramatic) loss of pic quality ... due to used formats & standards...

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