complete novice who's now tired of looking

this is how it goes. i have acces to 1 VHS player, 1DV camcorder (anlogue in), iMovie, ffmpegx, sizzle toast 6, MMB.

input 1 widescreen (ar 2.35:1) film, record to iMovie, export as complete 120mins. PAL encode in ffmpegx.

this is where i'm a little stuck. 1st question? what settings/ process (combination of processes) should i be using? my end goal is to burn onto 1 DVD, with menus and chapters and in the correct AR, nicely centred on my TV.

i've tried the 2.35:1 setting (cannot remember if i checked the letterbox or not). finished off with sizzle, tred using 16:9 and 4:3 formats, with both giving unacceptable results, by which i mean the opening background images are ok but the video when played on host dvd player finds the image very cramed at the top of the t.v, although playing perfectly ok with VLC on 1ghz 700+ RAM iMac.

i thought for speed/efficiency the 2.35:1 setting would be ideal, obviously not wasting time encoding the black portions. is this where my problem lies?. the other thing i noticed, which i think i've picked up through reading through these forums is the overscan distortion, which is always there. could this be adding to the problem (ie my tv picking it up as picture information) and trying to squeeze this all in the viewable area. how can i crop it out, or more to the point how can i get my VHS recorder to stop sending it, or my DV camcorder to stop adding it?

going back to ffmpegx, briefly tried the 16:9 and previewed it whilst encoding, but the AR didn't look right. i'm now encoding @ 4:3 as i'm assuming the film is still actually a 4:3 format but with borders. the preview looks promising, but so did the 2.35 option.

because i'm getting good results when played back with VLC etc, how can i really tell what my DVD player is going to show, otherwise i'm quickly and wastefully going to run out of DVD's

also, and this is where the newbie really comes out, i've only got a DVD-R i was hoping to utilise the CD-RW element of the drive to write smaller snippets of the movie as DVD/ Video_ts format and try burning this format to the CD. and again although I can get this to 'kinda' playback on my mac, my DVD player will only recognise the media as CD although it carries the video_ts folder etc, can we actually do this ie hold record DVD data and format to a CD ,or is there a particular format carried with each medium and cannot be recreated?

finally toast makes claim that it will fit wth variable bitrate the input to match in this case this case 1 DVD. why is it then, i find it reporting in the case of the above film, a requirement for c>5.5GB. when ffmpegX with mpegenc can easily manage it. what is toasts capabilities, i must admit i really only purchased it for the SVCD part, in particular creating photo albums etc, but still if it says it can variable bitrate to what extent.

sorry if this is all a little long and old hat, but i must admit i cannot seem to get this info elsewhere, its not for the want of trying.

regards